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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

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

#311

Post by mpweiher »

RandomLensman wrote: post #284
mpweiher wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Electricity supply to consumers was affected how? And please separate this out from the general energy crisis of 2021-2023.

Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades.

Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for that to ever work. Glad you cleared that up for us.

But to be clear, it wasn't some random "human nature" that caused the underinvestment. It was official government policy, and that government policy has now been changed.

The renewables mafia that is still in control in Germany was also in control in France. That has been taken care of, mostly by being exposed to the harsh light of Reality™.

The law that mandated reduction and forbade expansion of nuclear was repealed March 2023. They are now expanding capacity, build first 6 and then an additional 8 simplified EPR2 reactors.

And there was one more reason for the lull in investment: France did the initial expansion under the Messmer Plan far too quickly. They nuclearized their grid in just 15 years.

Which sounds great, and of course completely puts the lie to those who claim that nuclear is "too slow". But there is a problem: these nuclear plants are not just quick to build, they also last pretty much forever, at least 60 years, many if not most are being extended to 80 years and the experts say there's no reason not to go to 100.

If you have built all the nuclear power plants you need in 15 years and they last 100 years, you have nothing to build for 85 years (or 65 / 45 years if you assume 80/60 year lifespans).

That's a problem, because your nuclear industry will wither and die in that time.

Which it pretty much did.

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

#312

Post by bryanlarsen »

credit_guy wrote: post #308
bryanlarsen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. Yo…

What you say makes sense. But what if we need to generate 50 times more electricity than we do now? At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. You might think 50 is absurd, but consider this: right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our en…

> At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land.

Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X. And it's a problem that'll only happen if we solve the global warming problem first.

> right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our energy use to electricity. The big culprits are transportation, steel, concrete and fertilizers. That's a factor of 3.

But we mostly use fuels that are 30% - 60% efficient plus wastage for production, refining and transporting. Over 2/3rds of the energy we use gets wasted as heat. So we've got a factor of 1/3 to cancel out your 3 here. It's not completely efficient so it's actually about 1.2X, not 3X.

> Then we want to increase everyone's standards of living to match the current standard of living of the average American or European person.

Yep, that's a good 3X, if not more there. But unfortunately it's going to take decades to accomplish this.

> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions in the atmosphere. If, as Elon wants, we end up having hundreds or thousands of launches per day, and we want these launches to be net zero, then we need to find a way to manufacture hundreds of millions of tons of synthetic fuel each year.

> Each SpaceX Starship launch puts about 5000 tons of CO2-equivalent emissions

Each launch would then be a 0.00001X, and is approximately equivalent to a trans-pacific plane flight. Thousands of flights per year would not be a significant fraction of the Earth's emissions. Hundreds of thousands of flights would be.

- solar is fine up to around 500X

- which won't happen this century

- when it happens power will be abundant enough that the cost calculations will be radically different

- technology will also be radically different. Maybe we'll use anti-matter reactors or something.

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

#313

Post by viraptor »

greenthrow wrote: post #215
RhysU wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.

Bullshit. Sun and wind can be built everywhere. They're just more effective some places than others. But they are cheaper than nuclear everywhere.

Let's stay realistic. You can build as many solar panels as you want in Iceland and you won't get any power from them mid winter. They're not just less effective, they would not be functional for over a month. That's not "everywhere".

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

#314

Post by Affric »

jakewins wrote: post #51
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. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage s…

Many documented cases of non zero marginal cost energy systems failing. And in response we have learnt to eliminate, minimise, and manage risk better in those systems.

But apparently, in zero marginal cost energy it’s impossible. The only energy systems where you can have reliability have rent seeking minerals companies selling you fuel.

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

#315

Post by credit_guy »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #312
credit_guy wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say makes sense. But what if we need to generate 50 times more electricity than we do now? At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. You might think 50 is absurd, but consider this: right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition most of our en…

> At some point solar and wind energy will start being very expensive because we'll run out of cheap land. Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X. And it's a problem that'll only happen if we solve the global warming problem first. > right now only about 30% of our energy consumption (and therefore emissions) is electricity. If we want to cut emissions to zero, we need to transition…

> Yes that might happen. But it'll happen at a number much greater than 50X.

It's difficult to say. We are not running out of land, that's for sure. But we are running out of cheap land. Or rather land where it is economical to build solar. Sahara has plenty of empty land, and it is plenty sunny all year long, but there are civil wars more often than not, various militias, corrupt governments, etc. The US has lots of deserts, but also lots of groups with various agendas that find ways to delay projects, and delays can transform good projects into bad projects.

As a concrete example, take California. California is very proud to be a leader in environmental issues. You can find on the state website the installed capacity per year. For the last 5 years it has been [1], in GW: 1.2 (in 2020), 1.5, 2.0, 2.3, 0.9 (in 2024, so far). The year over year growth rates were 26%, 35%, 10% and for this year -60%. This year is not over, and it's possible the numbers are not up to date, but it's quite unlikely we'll get to match last year's numbers, let alone see a double digit growth.

Or take Texas. Wikipedia has their annual numbers between 2007 and 2023 [2]. I did the math, and between 2007 and 2017 they experienced a 90% annual growth. Nice Moore's law at work there. For the next 4 years the average annual growth was 60%. And for the last 2 years, it was 28%. Nothing to sneeze at, but the trend is clear. Why, if the cost of the panels went down?

> Thousands of flights per year

Elon is not talking about thousands of flights per year. Thousands of flights per day. Millions per year. A million launches of 5 kT CO2e each equal 5 GT CO2 each. That's about 10% of the current worldwide emissions. Or about 30% of the current emissions that come from power generation. If we are to use synthetic fuel instead of fossil fuel, and you have a 30% efficiency of making synfuel (which is what a quick google search indicates), then you have a 2x increase in electricity needs.

[1] https://www.californiadgstats.ca.gov/charts/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas

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

#316

Post by RandomLensman »

mpweiher wrote: post #311
RandomLensman wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Electricity supply to consumers was affected how? And please separate this out from the general energy crisis of 2021-2023. Since we didn't have "no electricity for some months" in this one-off, and, as I explained elsewhere, had optionality, not quite sure how you extrapolate from an event not happening to an event happening every few decades. Gosh, so we're not ever going to invest sufficiently in battery tech for…

The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere (and it happened in an energy crisis - it happened when it happened). France isn't isolated.

Poor policy can happen again - such is human nature. So things need to work under poor policies, too.

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

#318

Post by hulitu »

fergonco wrote: post #19
1970-01-01 wrote: post #14

More nuclear is a good thing. FAANG nuclear is even better, because they will be be ready and equipped to push back the insane NIMBY crowd(s) and also don't need to be worried about getting reelected.

How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

> How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

That would not be a problem. FAANG controls the OSs and the media. /s

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

#319

Post by Ringz »

trenchgun wrote: post #259
bloopernova wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid! This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.

> We have a whole freaking energy grid! You actually don't. Not one fit for that purpose, at least without significant investment, permitting hurdles, delays etc etc.

If you think you don’t have that grid, your country has to build it (instead of billions and more than 10 years for nuclear). Like the Synchronous grid of Continental Europe [1] and [2] which I far from finished but a good start.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

2: https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/

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

#320

Post by imtringued »

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…

You'd be in trouble even if you had nuclear power. If the sun stops shining, our agricultural yields will approach zero and everyone would have to stay close to district heated buildings, due to the extreme cold.
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