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Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

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Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#301

Post by pydry »

coryrc wrote: post #299
pydry wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid scale batteries have become cost effective in the last two years. It'll take time to build out capacity but it'll take more time AND cost to build new nuclear plants.

Those batteries only have a few hours of storage at max power, they're for solving the duck curve not a week-long supply shortage (let alone seasonal fluctuations). If we got the Midwest on heat pumps, how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard? Right now we have no plan for addressing the occasional bad week besides overbuilding natural gas. That's worse than keeping our nuclear running a…

>how you planning to keep places heated when there's a week of blizzard?

When the wind is blowing really hard? Wind turbines?

The texas winter was a bit of an anomaly. It got so cold that every power source ending up failing because none were set up to deal with it even though all of them in theory could have (& would have if they were in, say, alaska).

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#302

Post by cinntaile »

pydry wrote: post #298
cinntaile wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These numbers are way off though, maybe those are just the cells? If we look at the 2021 estimates by the National Renewable Energy Labs for utility scale 4h batteries [0] We get cost estimates of 250 $/kWh for the high case, 200 $/kWh for the middle case and 150 $/kWh for the low case by 2030. [0] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/79236.pdf .

That seems to be the cost of the physical batteries, not the price the grid would pay the farm for.

That makes sense I guess.

Assume enough energy is supplied to charge the batteries. So lets say we want 1kWh during 4 hours, that puts our capital cost at 4 kWh*200$/kWh = 800$. Now we assume this system runs every day for 4 hours during ten years. Ten years sounds reasonable, but it could be less. 7 years maybe? So about 1kWh*365,25*10=14610kWh in total. That gives us 800$/14610kWh = 0,0548$/kWh or 54,8 $/MWh in 2030 if I didn't make a major mistake somewhere and assuming no efficiency losses. That's pretty good.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#303

Post by 08-15 »

naasking wrote: post #128
stjohnswarts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't afford to wait or not to hedge our bets. Nuclear is a hell of a hedge since we know it works. We know the French model works really well, but for some reason we, the country with the most heavily armed forces in the world, can't "protect" it. BS, moneyed interests and tree huggers are keeping us from fixing the problem until fusion comes along or uber cheap battery density 100x better than what we have curre…

Easily processed uranium will last us 80 years at current consumption rates. If you start building current nuclear reactor designs everywhere, we'll run out of it in less than 40 years. Then the price will skyrocket, and nuclear is already more expensive than renewables. We need different nuclear reactors, fast reactors or thorium that use uranium more efficiently to stave this off, but they're more dangerous and sti…

In April of 1986, the operators of a nuclear power plant turned of the coolant flow to their reactor under full power, just to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. The reactor just sat there peacefully doing nothing, because it was a fast neutron reactor, the EBR-2.

> they're more dangerous and still experimental

They were neither in 1986. But sure, let's build more "grid storage", which isn't even experimental.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#304

Post by stavros »

throw0101a wrote: post #287
stavros wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the "it's useless unless it's perfect" argument. Nuclear has the huge problem of not being available for another decade (because that's how long it takes to build plants). Until that is solved with some form of pocket reactor it can't solve the problem of greenhouse emissions.

> Nuclear has the huge problem of not being available for another decade (because that's how long it takes to build plants). At the very least we can stop shutting down the plants we currently have. There is a finite amount of infrastructure that can be built at any one time: instead of shutting down nukes and building renewables to take their place, we should be shutting down fossil fuel plants and having renewable…

Hey, no argument from me there.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#305

Post by 08-15 »

throwoutway wrote: post #156
sfifs wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is socially and therefore politically non-viable because (1) When nuclear accidents happen, they suddenly overturn the lives of a LOT of commoners all at once as opposed to slow and creeping and often "statistically determined" impact of other energy tech (2) technocrats have consistently failed to demonstrate the ability to create organisations that over the long term prioritize safety and the ability to pre…

> (maybe with the exception of US Naval Reactors org - but who knows given the secracy) Then perhaps the US Navy and their US Navy Corps of Engineers need to be tasked with building & maintaining a system of land-based reactors

Or maybe not. It was Navy training that destroyed TMI-2.

Instead of worrying about the loss off coolant, the operators worried about the reactor "going solid", which is slang for "no steam bubble is left in the primary coolant circuit". This made sense on the small Navy reactors they were trained on, but on the large land based ones. Arguably, it never made sense to take a submarine engine and turn it into a power plant.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#306

Post by opo »

Krasnol wrote: post #273
opo wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost should always be a consideration, but when you see people conveniently ignore some costs and focus on others, it does a disservice to the goal of decarbonizing the grid and it isn't clear what they are really trying to accomplish. The levelized cost for residential rooftop solar is about as high as nuclear, but that cost doesn't seem to matter to some advocates and they continue to strongly support subsidizing i…

I like how you talk about ignoring costs but don't even scratch on that nuclear waste burden which generations will have to carry.

In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:

"...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides) many of which last tens of thousands of years or longer and make conventional nuclear waste disposal so problematic. Most of the radioactive fission products (FPs) the reactor produces have much shorter half-lives: they are intensely radioactive in the short term but decay quickly. The IFR extracts and recycles 99.9% of the uranium and Transuranium elements on each cycle and uses them to produce power; so its waste is just the fission products; in 300 years their radioactivity will fall below that of the original uranium "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

While there are issues with nuclear power, the worry some people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future. The amount of waste is very manageable (the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum!) and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. (To help put it in perspective, do some web searches about the problems with coal waste - it will be a much harder problem to solve than nuclear waste and no money has been collected to cover the costs. The problems with coal waste aren't discussed much since people focus on the air pollution from burning coal as it directly kills so many people.)

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#308

Post by pydry »

cinntaile wrote: post #302
pydry wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be the cost of the physical batteries, not the price the grid would pay the farm for.

That makes sense I guess. Assume enough energy is supplied to charge the batteries. So lets say we want 1kWh during 4 hours, that puts our capital cost at 4 kWh*200$/kWh = 800$. Now we assume this system runs every day for 4 hours during ten years. Ten years sounds reasonable, but it could be less. 7 years maybe? So about 1kWh*365,25*10=14610kWh in total. That gives us 800$/14610kWh = 0,0548$/kWh or 54,8 $/MWh in 203…

Your link says a lifetime of 15 years. Capacity would degrade over time though.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#309

Post by Krasnol »

opo wrote: post #306
Krasnol wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you talk about ignoring costs but don't even scratch on that nuclear waste burden which generations will have to carry.

In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled (as it is in France) which would reduce the amount of waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel: "...What is more important today is why fast reactors are fuel-efficient: because fast neutrons can fission or "burn out" all the transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reacto…

> In terms of the waste, right now nuclear waste can be recycled

Waste is not "recycled" it's reprocessed. Recycling is what you do with materials from renewable energy sources.

Also, it's not "waste" but only the fuel which is a tiny amount of the waste you have to store for decades and reprocessing is not making it go away. Those small parts which are added to fresh fuel come back later, the rest remains and needs to be stored too. Also: the whole process is extremely expensive and those costs also do not appear on the energy price.

You people sound sometimes as if you believe that the waste somehow magically disappears or something.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor

"At present there are no Integral Fast Reactors in commercial operation."

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor

"In January 2018, it was reported that "the first installation of the pressure vessel cover of the world's first Gen IV reactor" had been completed on the HTR-PM.[12]"

"Work on the first demonstration HTR-PM power plant, composed of two reactors driving a single steam turbine, began in December 2012 [...] On 12 September 2021, one of the two reactor achieved criticality, becoming the first 4th generation nuclear reactor in the world to do so, and is scheduled to be connected to the electricity grid before the end of 2021"

So you have ONE reactor. In China. It took 9 years to get it into operation. How is this again supposed to fight climate change? You don't even know how well it works...not even mentioning the costs in countries with proper safety and construction laws.

> The US government has been taxing power generated by nuclear power for decades and has collected billions of dollars to cover any costs in the future

Interesting. I'm sure you have some facts to support this claim. I'm especially interested in the estimates for "future" and what they're based upon. Especially in the US where nuclear power has been known for different reasons regarding taxpayer money: https://news.yahoo.com/ex-ceo-oversaw-doomed-nuclear-0529034...

> The amount of waste is very manageable

This is a gross generalisation which has not source in reality. There are different storages of waste. Some are good, some are bad. Some leak. Others don't...yet. Some waste just lies around in remote areas. Stop spreading misinformation.

> the Netherlands actually stores their waste in an art museum

No they don't...museums can store their art in some of the nuclear storage facilities...my god the crap some people believe...https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/WR-The_art_of_radioactive...

> and in a relatively short amount of time we will likely be able to use most of this "waste" to generate electricity.

No we won't.

As I said above and you could have found out with very little research (actually just reading some of the wikipedia articles you've linked would help), it is only the fuel which can be reprocessed and only if it has been properly stored just for this cause and if you have the facility which almost nobody has. Most of the fuel we have and is being used atm is not suited for reprocessing and never will be. We usually don't even know the state of the stored stuff because we don't even have the facility to "look" into the containers.

And as I said: fuel is only a very small amount of the waste a nuclear facility produces and which has to be stored for generations.

I won't even go into your whataboutism for coal because there is no connection to this discussion. You know...the one where you desperately try to play down the cost for nuclear waste storage instead just admitting that those costs are nowhere to be found in the energy prices.

Re: Nuclear power is the best climate-change solution

#310

Post by NaNDude »

Krasnol wrote: post #270
NaNDude wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like you missed the most important part of your own source : "Atomic power from France’s 58 reactors accounts for over 75 percent of its electricity needs. Available nuclear power supply was down 1.4 percentage points at 65.3% of total capacity compared with Wednesday." this missing capacity is less the usual slowdown of reactors because of the hot rivers (which by the way is done for environmental and not tech…

> this missing capacity is less the usual slowdown of reactors because of the hot rivers (which by the way is done for environmental and not technical concern) and maintenances process, than a consequence of a previous nuclear plant closing (for political/electoral reasons). another consequence of this missing plant was to reopen two charcoal power plant _this_winter_. The report was from 2019 because it was the firs…

> The report was from 2019 because it was the first search result

yes and all your sources are post 2019 (the fessenheim reactor has been slowed since 2017, the project/idea to close it started in 2012, and the effective (not reversible) closing has happened on feb 2020 while it was stopped since more than 2 years) dont really see what's your point here...

> This is why you diversify your energy.

no, our electric mix was simply not build on nuclear, hydroelectric and charcoal was our first power source, nuclear allowed us to close charcoal mines and plants while fullfilling the growing electric needs. nuclear is'nt without constrains that hydroelectric dont have, however there is not much more places to have new hydros. "renewables" will maybe goes up to 8% in the coming years and has already cost us more than 50billions€ (governement subvention) which is nearly two time our current non running EPR cost :) note that those 50billions was only for deployment they does'nt include exploitation cost, that's a big difference between wind turbines and nuclear, nuclear cost is mostly capitalistic (start investment for 60years in the case of an EPR) while wind turbine cost must be evaluated over their full lifetime including market fluctuations, try to evaluate that for the 60 years comming, good luck!

> Yeah they should just look away more like in China...

what's your point here again ? changing a project constrain while it is already started add cost and delay, however once done, acquired expertise usually reduce cost and delay. we have choosen our way to do it, probably for good reasons.

> but I can't take such statements seriously. It's madness.

actually this is your statement, your making a straw man here.

> there was a study years ago

what let you think that an old study with probably outdated constrains and knowledges would be more serious than actual studies from recognized sources (ecole polytechnique, les mines) ? and more important, those studies to be comparable must have the same subject, replacing nuclear with wind turbines is not the same as replacing nuclear + transportation(gas) for example. with the current urge (climatical and political) to reduce gas based transportations, there is also an urge/need to grow electric supply up to two time the actual production (unless your looking for economical collapse by replacing gas with nothing). from this point of view, current renewable are just a joke in france since we have no industries on renewables (they poorly failed/died) which means we will be fully dependent on external supply, and yes that's madness.

ho one last point, those studies are usually done with wind turbine because solar panels end up using a lot more surface than wind turbines, that let you think of the surface needs with a mix of the two...

> this is France we're talking about. Those informations are easy to google.

actually i'm french and in france (in case my poor english was'nt a sufficient hint), those subjects are a perpetual technical and political debate here, i dont really need google press report to explain me what i'm living (actually its a known fact that press is'nt an opposable source in techical subjects, try google schoolar maybe...) :)

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