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Nuclear Power in France

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Re: Nuclear Power in France

#301

Post by mcguire »

shakow wrote: post #294
mcguire wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already factored in. I can't find my original reference, but here's once that doesn't factor in the difference: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/infographic-how-much-powe...

> Already factored in. I highly doubt that. The Tricastin NPP for instance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricastin_Nuclear_Power_Plant ) is a rather average one, producing up to 3660MW. An average windmill output stand around 2.5MW, hence equivalent 1464 windmills simultaneously running before accounting for the load factor. > but here's once This one is about a nuclear reactor , not an NPP. Typical NPPs features 2…

Hmm. Ok, let's see here...

* https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/nuclear-power-pl... (2019)

56 NPPs, 809,410,000 MWh (actually generated)

* https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-turbines-are-contained-us...

~60,000 wind turbines (I've seen numbers between 57,000 and 67,000.)

* https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/wind/electricity-generat... (2020)

338,000,000 MWh (actually generated)

1NPP -> 14,453,750 MWh/yr

1WT -> 5633 MWh/yr

1NPP == 2600 WT

You are absolutely correct.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#302

Post by worik »

concordDance wrote: post #199
worik wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years will it not?

Which is nowhere near as big a deal as it sounds. The damage it will do (on average) if glassed and buried 100ft under ground is absolutely negligible at the scale we are talking about (global climate change and energy in general). Yes, there's a 1 in 10000000 chance that 2000 years from now industrial age humans recovering from the apocalypse might dig a well in exactly that location and thousands will get sick with…

So you have a large dump that must remain secure for 200k years.

You cannot do that. There is no place on Earth that we can be sure is geologically stable over that time period.

What a selfish thing to do: Make future generations pay for our current consumption for millennia.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#303

Post by worik »

favorited wrote: post #224
worik wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years will it not?

Molten salt reactor waste should have a dramatically shorter half-life than waste from a light water reactor. MSR waste only needs a few hundred years of containment, not hundreds of thousands of years.

Explain that.

Makes no sense to me, but my physics education was decades ago

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#304

Post by favorited »

worik wrote: post #303
favorited wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Molten salt reactor waste should have a dramatically shorter half-life than waste from a light water reactor. MSR waste only needs a few hundred years of containment, not hundreds of thousands of years.

Explain that. Makes no sense to me, but my physics education was decades ago

Well I'm not a physicist, so take everything I say with a grain of (molten) salt, but it has to do with the kind of fuel used, which produces different waste products.

The half life of most of the waste product from a gen-3 uranium reactor is measured in millions of years (235U's half life is ~700 million years, for example).

In some gen-4 molten salt reactor designs, most of the waste product would have a half life measured in hours, so they wouldn't need to be put into long-term containment at all. And the rest of the waste products would only require a few hundred years before they are emitting only background level radiation.

Hopefully someone with actual education on this can give a more complete answer, but that's my Reader's Digest understanding.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#305

Post by nickik »

oezi wrote: post #293
nickik wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your logic is, only wind and solar can improve and nuclear can never improve.

I certainly can improve but it hasn't. Rather each year it has gotten longer to build reactors and more expensive. The trajectory is so negative that I am pessimistic it could match solar and wind at this point.

For a long time, one had every possible advantage and has been given massive subsidies and regulatory requirement. Its of course different from country to country but the basic story is the same in most of the western world.

Germany has spend billions over billions on the green transition for 20 years. Had Germany used the exact same money, to build as many reactor as possible as fast as possible and put them right next to existing coal plants they would likely be much further along.

Nuclear potential is insane. Like, just look at energy density. Nothing has as much energy density. And based on first principle, the total amount of resources required to do the transition with nuclear, is massively smaller then anything else.

Giving it the best possible shot and fullest possible support in the situation we are in, is just absolutely necessary.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#306

Post by concordDance »

avianlyric wrote: post #296
concordDance wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's sustainable long past the point we run out of radioactives. Just how much space do you think buried reactor cores take up and how big do you think the earth's crust is? You could literally throw it in the deep ocean and it'd still do less damage than a single day of Brazilian deforestation for biofuel production or a month of operation of a coal plant (partially because water is actually quite good at blocking…

I’m not fundamentally against the idea of nuclear power. I just remain unconvinced that we’ve “solved” the problem of nuclear waste. Nuclear waste remains dangerous and harmful on a timescale that can almost be described as tectonic. The earths crust isn’t static or stationary, if you throw waste into the bottom of the ocean its not clear what will happen to that waste in 10 millions years time, or even 300 years tim…

I would advise checking the decay curves for nuclear waste and checking what levels of radiation cause harm.

The tldr is that waste that decays slowly is doing so because its releasing less radiation. There's no radioactive stuff that we'd need to worry about on the million year timescale. The 10000 year timescale is the most where human health due to radioactivity might be a concern. And on those timescales your waste at the bottom of the ocean or 100ft below ground is almost certainly going to be still there and unaffected unless we or our successors decide otherwise.

Heck I'd say worrying about anything more than the 500 year timescale is absurd as I'd be very surprised if humans were still around in human form by then. We'll either have been genetically engineered, wiped out by those who have, wiped out by rogue AI or something else or been "uploaded" in some fashion.

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#307

Post by sudosysgen »

jhgb wrote: post #278
sudosysgen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually quite sustainable. The reactor core is not a large cost for a GW over 15 years. The US navy swaps out reactor cores for 100-200 million dollars, and those are in submarines and ships. There is basically no maintenance outside of those. For comparison, a GW of wind capacity is 1.6 billion every 20 years. For solar panels for 1GW of average generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so every 25-30…

> For solar panels for 1GW of average generation you'll be paying 10 billion dollars or so every 25-30 years. Where do you live that panels cost you $1.5+/Wp? Furthermore, where do you live that panels will cost you $1.5+/Wp even thirty years from now?

You have to multiply the cost by three for average power to account for clouds, angle, night time, and then you need to pay extra for storage. That will cost you...

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#308

Post by bildung »

adev_ wrote: post #291
bildung wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany is firing up coal plants because they're decomissining their nuclear reactors in favour of intermittent energy sources No they aren't, they are decomissioning coal plants, too, and at a much faster rate than nuclear. From 2013 to 2020 nuclear as share of Germany's energy mix went from 17% to 13%. https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en& ... During the same time, coal went from 45% to 23%…

Fact is that even today (13/10/2021) Germany is still running its electricity production at 51% on Coal, when France uses coal for close to nothing due to Nuclear [1]. And it is very unlikely to change on medium term (next 20 years) due to the unreliable nature of the renewable energy supply. The result is that electricity production in France today causes around 74gCo2/kwh emission when Germany is around 469g/kwh. M…

> Fact is that even today (13/10/2021) Germany is still running its electricity production at 51% on Coal,

And one day later it's 38.7%, which shows that daily fluctuations are quite high. Therefore my link to the 2020 average, which was 23%.

> taxes are close to the same in France with close to 31% of the cost only in Taxes [2]. That along does not justify the 2x difference of price.

Here it is in detail, the net energy prices in Germany vs. France are about the same: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Re: Nuclear Power in France

#309

Post by silexia »

redm wrote: post #2

"Government policy is to reduce this to 50% by 2035." I'm no expert on Nuclear power but it seems to me were going in the wrong direction. At a time when we're investing so much money in other fuels, we could be investing that in better nuclear power, like Small Modular Reactors [1], Sodium Cooled Fission, Small Pellet reactors, etc. [2] [1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/advanced-small-modular-reactors-sm... [2] https://…

Nuclear is immensely more efficient and safer and better for the environment than any other option including solar, wind, coal, or gas. Every nation should be working towards increasing their nuclear power production, not reducing it.
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