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Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

nytimes.com

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Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#361

Post by nabla9 »

ZetaZero wrote: post #358
fallingknife wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2021 US power consumption was 3.93 PWh. 5500 GWh is a bit over 12 hours of consumption. Not gonna cut it. And that's assuming 100% of the batteries are used for grid storage, and there is no demand growth in the next 8 years.

With Vogtle 3 & 4, the only nuclear plants coming online in the US, the construction costs are now projected to be $30 billion for 2.2 GW. We'd need ~1000 of these size plants to power the US. That's not going to cut it either.

Nuclear is needed for base load, not for all electricity needs.

Nuclear is the most cost effective way to achieve base load.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#362

Post by Manuel_D »

dane-pgp wrote: post #359
Manuel_D wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They exist in prototypes, I am not aware of any grid scale energy storage facilities using thermal batteries. Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? Remember the US uses 8GWh of electricity per minute .

> Are there any >1GWh thermal battery facilities? I don't know about that, but for comparison, the "world’s biggest battery storage system" opened last year in California[0] at 400MW / 1,600MWh. [0] https://www.energy-storage.news/expansion-complete-at-worlds...

Which is a lithium ion battery facility. Not a thermal batter facility.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#363

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #352
pfdietz wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's overnight cost, not included in model.energy. You also have to add in the financing cost during construction. If we are talking about Korean export NPPs, the Barakh NPP has four reactors for a total of 24.4B$, producing 5.6GW(e). THis is about $4B/GW. If I plug in 4000 per MW (its euros, not $, but they're not too different right now) for the capital cost of nuclear in model.energy, increase the NPP lifetime t…

Do the same and use German data, and nuclear optimizes to 100%. The US has especially abundant wind and solar. I would very much like to see a similar model that includes a demand curve. Preferably, customizable demand curves, to allow for modeling of e.g. flatter curves due to electric vehicle charging at night.

Yes, Europe (and particularly eastern Europe) are better places for nuclear, because of higher latitude and (away from coasts) lower winds.

This is all just delaying the crossing point though. Nuclear fans are betting nuclear's costs fall while renewables and storage run into brick walls and stop getting cheaper. It's not clear why one should assume this, or why an investor should bet on that outcome. And it is just a financial bet; in the worst case for renewables they just come in a bit more expensive than nuclear, so it's not like the economy explodes.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#364

Post by trashtester »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #351
trashtester wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVERYTHING around us is contaminated in some way or another. We are constantly bombarded by cosmic radiation with doses far in excess of the expose you will get from eating those mushrooms. Below 100mSv, there is "no evidence" that exposure leads to any elevation of cancer risk. At levels covered by the article, ie 1000Bq/kg / 80000 Bq/mSv = 0.0125 mSv/kg. In other words, you can eat 8 tons of those mush before there…

How radioactive are covid vaccines?

They are bioactive, not very radioactive....

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#365

Post by dane-pgp »

lelag wrote: post #297
ncmncm wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not doomed to see the world burn. We know what to do: just build renewables. It is dishonest to claim that using carbon to build them is a problem. The more we build, the less carbon is used on them. When you need falsehoods to make your case, you have no case.

Falsehood ? What do you know about building windmills ? I admit that I don't myself know much, but I can tell you that you need at least: - A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal - Possibly a chemical industry to make composite material - A logistic industry to move components around the world using petrol (all the solar and wind renewable production is based in china) - Cement to build your fondation…

> A modern metallurgy industry using coal to make steal

Nuclear reactors also require steel (and a chemical industry and cement) but fortunately that doesn't require coal:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-steel-...

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#366

Post by briandear »

cycomanic wrote: post #195
eldaisfish wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your final comparison there is an excellent example of hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is something that advocates of renewables regularly want to dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one. Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a…

Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more. Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become (this is happening already for economic reasons in Europe) the less this is an is…

> The wind still blows at night, so you do not need battery storage to provide all the demand during the night.

The wind doesn't blow as strongly at night. It's much calmer.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#367

Post by philwelch »

cycomanic wrote: post #185
adrianN wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a common use of "unsolved at scale". We know how to do it, it just doesn't make economic sense right now. I mean, suppose you have hundreds of GW of storage of some form installed. You could just claim it's still not "solved at scale" because the global energy consumption is even higher.

Well nuclear proponents handwave away the massively higher costs, the still unsolved long term storage problem (it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world), and insurance for the case of a disaster.

> it's been >70 years of nuclear power and there still does not exist a long term storage facility in the world

It's bizarre how anti-nuclear activists point at problems caused by anti-nuclear activism and ask, like Eric Andre, "how could nuclear power do this?"

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#368

Post by philwelch »

cinntaile wrote: post #285
philwelch wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you need 100% storage supply. So you don't have power outages on windless nights.

You generally use peaker plants or backup fossil fuel or hydro for that use case, at this point in time batteries are used to supply power for a couple of hours at best. You need that backup power anyway for when the nuclear plant is out of commission for some reason.

Regardless of how you're generating your power, you're going to need to overprovision your generation capacity slightly to account for downtime. You only need storage if all of your generation capacity is offline at the same time, which is inevitable with solar power (nighttime), possible with gas (pipeline failure?), but less inherently likely with nuclear.

> backup fossil fuel

In practice this means fossil fuels become the baseload power source.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#369

Post by SequoiaHope »

photochemsyn wrote: post #62
philwelch wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... I'm pretty sure this cost comparison comes down firmly on the side of wind/solar/storage. Storage is the main cost barrier for 100% renewable-powered grids, but this is also an area where technological development is possible. Sure, if you handwave the unsolved-at-scale technical problems with grid energy storage and make a series of generous assumptions about future technology, that's probably true. Nuclear te…

'handwave the unsolved-at-scale' ? All you have to do is look at Australia: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/08/10/worlds-largest-grid-f... > Battery rollout: "AGL Energy has committed to build 850 MW of battery-based assets by 2024. To that end, Torrens Island marks the first project to be constructed at the site of a fossil-fuel power plant. It won’t be the last, however, as big batteries are planned for New South…

> the cost to build this 13,000 MW facility would be $12.1 billion, which is still just 50% of the cost of the $25 billion Vogtle nuclear plant.

Yes this is generally my argument. If you take the money you would spend on nuclear and spend it instead on solar, wind, gridscale storage, as well as EV and home battery rebates, you end up with a much more robust distributed energy production grid with very low maintenance costs. I think the idea of including rebates for home batteries and EVs is an important one, because it means that when major parts of the power line system are knocked out for some reason, you still have a lot of distributed storage.

You can also begin energy production with a solar and battery roll out MUCH sooner than new nuclear construction. From a climate change perspective, producing clean energy sooner is a big deal.

And we should not overlook that nuclear energy is a single target for terrorist attack and requires a powerful state to manage security for the plant and its supply chain, while batteries and renewables require no such thing. From a libertarian/anarchist perspective, we can have a weaker state and still have good energy production with renewables.

EDIT: I am also realizing that handing out a bunch of rebates to the voters for new stuff (rooftop solar, home batteries, new EVs) would be WAY more politically popular than "lets pay now for a big monolithic nuclear power plant that takes 20 years to build." If you want a plan that actually works, keeping the voters happy seems like an important component.

Re: Nuclear is back on the table for a green future

#370

Post by philwelch »

cycomanic wrote: post #195
eldaisfish wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your final comparison there is an excellent example of hand-waving away the problem of intermittency. This is something that advocates of renewables regularly want to dismiss because the discussion is a difficult one. Wind and solar are cheap now because their fuel cost is zero and the cost of grid reliability is borne by us - consumers. In a better world, the cost of balancing the grid at night should be borne by a…

Nuclear has the same issue of intermittency. You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage. Nuclear is much more expensive than wind/solar so if you follow an overprovisioning strategy the best is to build wind/solar capacity, because it buys you more. Moreover, the larger and more integrated grids become (this is happening already for economic reasons in Europe) the less this is an is…

> You have to either overprovisioning if you use nuclear or use battery storage.

Whereas with solar and wind, you need to do both, because you need the overprovisioned capacity to recharge the batteries.

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