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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

#321

Post by berkes »

Ancapistani wrote: post #176
berkes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. An energy mix is the answer. One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, a…

> One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. All of those things, to me, mean that it should be a large part of the mix. Nuclear should be the backbone of our energy production, and should be sufficient to supply our baseline needs.…

This market thing is in place already. At least in Europe it is, I've done a project during my energy engineering study for APEX.

The irony, however, is that it's not all that good for nuclear. When prices go down or even negative, a CHP or windmill is shut down in minutes. The nuclear plant (or ancient coal, or even hydro) will go below cost price, or even havs to pay to deliver electricity, because they can't not deliver. And in Europe we are having a few times of negatively priced electricty per year recently.

And contrary to what many people think, nuclear power is rather expensive. For a small part that's political (subsidies and all), but mostly it's because running a nuclear plant is expensive; its fuel is expensive as hell (it does burn fuel), and storing its waste "guaranteed" safe for some 5.000 years is expensive (incredible timescales; egyptians building pyramids - to now, timescales). Also expensive is it's cooling facilities: nuclear operates on a steam cycle, so it needs a lot of cooling; many places don't have that (anymore). E.g. in France some plants were shut down because rivers dried up too much and they'd be heating up the remaining "trickle" too much with these plants. That makes it unreliable, the way hydro, tidal, etc can be unreliable too.

There are just so much problems with nuclear power. Again, aside from the political "opinions" on it: these well known percieved risks and such. But that makes it a difficult part of that mix. I do believe it should be a crucial part, but also am convinced that part should be as small as possible, due to those downsides, costs. And, as you say, indeed, in places where there's alternatives, you'll find these alternatives are almost always a better option, cost, timescale and operational wise.

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

#322

Post by Wytwwww »

satiric wrote: post #235
himinlomax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody died at TMI. Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami) Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl. Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others. There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of th…

No one died at Fukushima... They did have to evacuate over 150,000 people though. I'm not sure we should be normalizing that.

That's still pretty much a freak incident and insignificant compared to the direct damage (i.e. even if we exclude CO2) burning fossil fuels (especially coal is causing)

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

#323

Post by [deleted] »

Tade0 wrote: post #207
Yawrehto wrote: post #206

Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data ( https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy ), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more…

> It's cheap That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now. And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...

[deleted]

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

#324

Post by Wytwwww »

Tade0 wrote: post #207
Yawrehto wrote: post #206

Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data ( https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy ), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more…

> It's cheap That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now. And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...

Often mainly due to political reasons though.

Also you can't really make meaningful conclusions based on that plot due to obvious reasons. It only includes "Number of nuclear reactors shutdown worldwide". The construction peak was ~1980. The oldest commercial plant was opened only 68 years ago and obviously the early plants much less safe and had a shorter lifetime which introduces another bias...

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

#325

Post by bryanlarsen »

pona-a wrote: post #289
bryanlarsen wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number I heard was 8x. Solar is about 50 cents / kW, a "24 hour" solar grid is about $4/kW. But that's still about half the price of a natural gas grid and 1/5th the cost of nuclear.

What about negative externalities? If we were to force all actors to pay for their emissions and toxic by-products, factoring the entire lifecycle into the cost, what would it look like then? If, even with that in mind, solar looses to nuclear, that would be a fairly interesting result.

The total lifecycle cost of nuclear is massive - rehab'ing a nuclear plant would be well into the 10s of billions.

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

#326

Post by greenthrow »

viraptor wrote: post #313
greenthrow wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

There's a reason i said "sun and wind."

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

#327

Post by mpweiher »

RandomLensman wrote: post #316
mpweiher wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The supply was there because there was supply from elsewhere

Exactly, as I wrote. Which is why they were able pursue the option "shut everything down at once and fix immediately" without any negative repercussions apart from EDFs bottom line for that one year.

(Though that apparently was not the biggest negative impact on their bottom line that year. The bigger one was being compelled by law to sell electricity to their competitors at 4 cents/kWh and having to buy it back at market rates that were spiking due to the energy crisis).

There was also the option "stagger the shutdowns and take a slightly elevated risk of one of the triple-redundant cooling systems failing". Which they might have preferred to reducing electricity supply for the country or accelerating repairs. But they didn't have to do that.

> So things need to work under poor policies, too.

Nothing works under arbitrarily bad policy, and such a standard is not applied to anything in the real world.

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

#328

Post by tivert »

throwaway48540 wrote: post #260
tivert wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're claiming it would be terrible for the rest of us, without supporting that assumption in any way. I literally explained it. I straightforwardly applied the technology to our existing social/economic structure. And changing the social/economic structure is probably harder than developing the technology and requires precisely the kind of power that a successful AGI technology would remove (e.g. workers can't st…

You did not explain anything, you just said that something would happen, without any reasoning why or why no counter effects would happen. Yes, both sides of the debate use scifi as facts, I agree. I don't think the other side does it more than you do, though.

> You did not explain anything, you just said that something would happen, without any reasoning why or why no counter effects would happen.

If you think that, the problem's on your end of the connection. The most charitable read of your comment is you're expecting a level of exposition that is not actually required, especially given the common context of what exists now.

Personally, I think you're actually doing more of what you're accusing me, for instance your sibling comment of:

> The economic system is not set in stone. If everyone is irrelevant to it, the economic system becomes irrelevant to everyone, and a parallel system gradually replaces it.

You're basically hand-waving a future and saying "everything will be fine." And you're also misunderstanding some significant things in a kind of black and white way. E.g. I never said "everyone [would be] irrelevant [to the economic system]," I said labor would be. That's a lot of people, but not everyone.

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

#329

Post by nzjrs »

satiric wrote: post #235
himinlomax wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody died at TMI. Nobody died at Fukushima (from the nuclear incident that is, 10000 died because of the Tsunami) Hundreds of people died at Chernobyl. Those are all the major accidents at production nuclear power plant that have ever occured. There are no others. There is just one that was deadly, and it is about as representative of the safety of nuclear power as flying in a 1920s' plane compared to a state of th…

No one died at Fukushima... They did have to evacuate over 150,000 people though. I'm not sure we should be normalizing that.

'have to' is a contested point here.

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

#330

Post by nzjrs »

Tade0 wrote: post #207
Yawrehto wrote: post #206

Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data ( https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy ), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more…

> It's cheap That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now. And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...

There has been a generation of activists and NIMBYs campaigning and protesting to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear, while having this delicious benefit of now being also able to claim about the cost of nuclear.

The ballooning of costs is not even significantly due to changing safety requirements, but often due to compliance and environmental requirements. Those are political requirements that could be removed in one fell swoop.

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