291–300 of 368 posts
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I didn't find any details on the new pricing structure so in the article...
Just dig up a bit the way the CfDs are working ....
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Nuclear waste is a problem, but it is nothing compared to the waste from gas and coal, which we release to the atmosphere daily. It kills thousands every year and will kill millions in the future. And you may think: well there you go, let's get rid of all of that and just use renewables then. But we can't, as the parent comment demonstrates. Some days you just need a stable energy source, and your only realistic choi…
Agree, CO2 emissions are big problem, a life threatening one for some people. Nuclear is a problem too, just not a global obe. You know, both things can be true at the same time. Again, what would be your alternative way forward? Coal and oil burning has to go, that much is sure. We still need electricity so, hence we need clean sources. And we need them fast, because as a species we were asleep at the wheel for way…
Sometimes the only realistic answer is "We should have done X, many years ago" - I think society and humans in general need to get better at admitting this. Sometimes we back ourselves into a corner and we just need to accept that as a fact.
But due to the situation we are in, the actual realistic answer I have is continue to burn coal and gas as a bridge while we do a crash program to train up the next generation of nuclear engineers and construction workforce.
Start 100 reactor sites right now and understand they are mostly going to be used as on-the-job training for construction crews for the next decade while we burn co2 and learn how to build things again.
Of course continue to install as many gigawatts of solar and wind during that time period as you can while expanding the grid. As you spin up your "nuclear batteries" you can then start spinning down coal and gas and let your renewables take up the peak loads. Load prediction and larger grids have become reliable enough now that you can spin up nuclear in a predictable fashion for load-following, with a small amount of grid battery hanging around for those few hours of surprises per year.
Hydro is interesting but effectively 100% utilized worldwide at this point. Once you get your nuclear workforce geared up and the initial surge of demand completed, perhaps start looking at modifying as much hydro capacity in the world to act in both directions as pumped storage. Imagine pumping water back into Lake Mead from downstream when there is excess power generation. Exceedingly inefficient - but starts to become interesting when you have grid-tied batteries that actually work at scale.
Edit: Nuclear is only dead in the developed world because we chose it to be so. Society can decide tomorrow to change that decision if properly motivated. We have many times in the past for much harder things than building a few hundred industrial plants we already have built before.
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Yes, because any transition takes time. And since people still want heating during said transition we still need gas. And since gas is the cleanest fossil fuel we have, yes, let's built pipelines. Which can be reporposed for green hydrogen in a potential future. Unless of course, you want to go pre-industrial that is.
Or maybe just maybe we can say that it doesn't work and it failed? Building more gas pipes after the Russian war is pure insanity, even if you don't care about the environment
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Nuke plant -> btc mining with excess load when load is not demanded Nuke plant -> consumers when in demand Pretty easy equation, much more reliable and much more scalable and not subject to the whims of the elements / can be done anywhere and on any planet in the solar system.
BTC mining is the exact opposite of scalable: there's a fixed supply of BTC available to mining, so you can only pay for so many nuclear power plants with it. Even the entire bitcoin market cap is about enough for 20 nuclear power plants, optimistically (and that's ignoring the cost of the miners themselves, risk, etc, etc).
Beyond that, bitcoin works and is here to stay. It is the first sovereign currency free from the tyranny of small minded rulers. It will always have significant and likely increasing value over time, and its pattern of value generation (bound to physics / energy) will always exist now in one form or another.
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Those are the share of nuclear and renewables in total electricity production, therefore this is quite real. In which way 'electricity production' isn't real, or not helping to reduce greenhouse-gas effect emissions?
In the real world, the grid got almost shut down by the Russian war and the salvation came from even dirtier gas from the US
The only grid that got shot up was the Ukrainian one. And even then gas still flowed through to Eastern Europe...
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At what cost?
Good question! At what cost do the externalities of fossil fuels come? What is the cost of inaction? What are you trying to achieve with this banal line of questioning?
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`Nuclear "just works"` No it doesn't. Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk and nuclear waste is not paid for. So nuclear operators are freeloading on society for decades making billions of profits [0]. To make nuclear "work", one would need to adjust insurance and establish a trust to pay for nuclear waste facility operation for the next hundres of years. But then, no one would operate them nuclear p…
The pro-nuclear growd (funny how easy it is for otherwise smart people to be sold on mere talking points) has a point so: during generation a nuclear power plant doesn't emit CO2. What people willfully (?) ignore is the simple fact that a) we don't have enough nuclear capacity installed, and never did and b) you cannot just wish nuclear power plants into existence. The latter being the main blocking point. Just how y…
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You're just assigning magical value to "turn it off". That's only a big deal with fossil fuels due to the fuel cost, the fuel cost of nuclear is marginal. Yes, I agree that it's stupid to build a (big) nuclear power plant only to use it to boil an Olympic sized swimming pool most of the time. But that's stupid because we're over-relying on "green" energy that can't provide baseload power. It's even more stupid with f…
The problem with your logic is, that nuclear is _only_ competitive with a 100% utilization rate/capacity factor. Only with these 90+% capacity factors do you get to competitive rates per kWh produced. Otherwise the initial CapEx is just too large, especially in a non-zero rate environment, as these plants are _already_ scoped/calculated/financed to 40 years. At 90+% capacity factor! That amount of CapEx is basically…
What matters is what is the most realistic mix of power generation and storage for 24x7 reliability. This can of course look very different depending on the situation. Many will argue for distributed storage (e.g. home batteries) - but that just means poor people don't get reliable electric service.
I really don't find that solar is "too cheap to meter" during peak sunlight very interesting. Who cares. What I find interesting is that I can turn a dial on my nuclear power plant to whatever it is I feel like at any time, and have it operating at that capacity within an hour or three.
Since we have such a dial, if you owned both the solar and the nuclear plants you would very likely combine them in a manner that maximizes profits while maintaining continuous service. Short of clouds, regional solar and wind prediction is extremely good to the point that modern nuclear plants may as well be load following. Add in a bit of battery for those minutes (hours max) that surprise you and you're good to go on that front.
You still will need some gas peaker plants for those crazy once-in-a-decade days you don't want to overbuild nuclear capacity for, but you could drastically reduce this infrastructure from what is effectively a 1:1 ratio today.
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`Nuclear "just works"` No it doesn't. Nuclear power plants are nowhere near insured to risk and nuclear waste is not paid for. So nuclear operators are freeloading on society for decades making billions of profits [0]. To make nuclear "work", one would need to adjust insurance and establish a trust to pay for nuclear waste facility operation for the next hundres of years. But then, no one would operate them nuclear p…
> [0] Fukushima is around $80B-$200B, the US nuclear insurance coverage is $15B. Chernobyl was around $200B. So you speak about $400B, lets consider it upper bound and even up to $500B by adding the cost Three Miles island incident and the various minor ones around the world. Spread over 60 years of the humanity nuclear power usage, that makes us an insurance cost of 8.3 billions dollar per year at world scale . So t…
However, to your last point: You are saying that nuclear power plants then are insured to risk. Can you point me in your sources to the place where it is shown how nuclear power plant operators today then are insuring "to risk" the risk of nuclear disaster and all costs and risks of the disposal?
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>Organizations active in nuclear power agree, new projects aren't launched anymore Nuclear power plants projects are ongoing everywhere around the world [1]. Do note generalize Germany fanatical behaviour to the entire world, this is not representative. [1]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
I explicity said elswhere that the devloping world is different, didn't I? In the developed world, read western industrial nations, nuclear is launched anymore. Those legacy projects, Hinkley C or in Finland, run late and cost more than planned. And they a certainly more expensive than solar and wind. Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, ma…
There is Korea, USA, France, UK, Slovakia and the UAE in the list.
In longer term, you can add Japan, Czeck Republic, Poland (under investigation) and even Italy is considering it right now.
You should certainly said to them that they are not part of your definition of the developed world.
> Nuclear is good for base load, the old inflexible kind, only. It is didficult to ramp up and down on short notice, making a grid less flexible the more nuclear is deployed
Good. The grid worked on good old inflexible based load for a century now and it prooved it works. Lets continue on that and make it low Carbon at the same time.