Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

world-nuclear-news.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 396 posts

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#361

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #244
ben_w wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True but irrelevant. The construction of new reactors now is unlikely to be in numbers greater than back then. (Unless new ones are SMR, which is why there's now business interest in SMRs. They may well have numbers large enough to cut costs).

The other issue is that nuclear research has been underfunded for decades. We could have had new safe effective and cost efficient designs.

Nuclear energy has had a massive research advantage over its entire lifetime. It simply never delivers due to being horrifically expensive.

You just keep making empty promises that never work out in reality. Just look at Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.

You want more of that?!?

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#362

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

surgical_fire wrote: post #15
mg wrote: post #3

Isn't the price of a KW of solar panels similar to the price of a KW of nuclear power these days? I wonder what hinders us to replace the roofs of all houses with solar panels and put batteries in all cellars? It might still be useful to build out nuclear power plants. But the solar+battery approach seems like an easier first step to increase the available power, doesn't it?

It doesn't matter. As far as I am concerned, self sufficiency comes before price concerns. Nuclear is very safe and reliable. By all means, EU countries should keep investing in Solar, Wind, Geotermal, etc. but that should be done alongside Nuclear.

Why waste money on horrifically expensive nuclear power?

Look at the energy crisis. Did we have a lack of energy? No, the pricing mechanism made sure we had no rolling blackouts.

Did we have expensive energy? Yes, that was the whole crisis.

You want to lock in another energy crisis because you are completely locked into trying to justify building nuclear power.

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#363

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #92
hengheng wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always with nuclear there are a few taboo topics. One of them being fuel supply. For European reactors that seems to be either Mali/Niger, or Russia. Both not excellent if the goal is geopolitical independence. Solar, wind and batteries have no fuel concerns, and they are inherently decentralized.

Are you joking? Renewables mean one order of magnitude more raw materials imports from China and Chinese operated mining in unstable African countries. With some work and investment European nuclear fuel supply could be 100% free from Russia, which anyway is peanuts compared to billions spent on Russian LNG. Uranium ore can come from Canada, Kazakhstan and Australia, not only African countries.

So what happens to your existing installations when China stops selling renewables?

They will keep working for years as you find new suppliers for spare parts. When the reach EOL you need to find a new supplier.

In the meantime the already existing required firming capacity might be run a bit harder to manage any shortfall.

But in the nuclear cult that is equivalent to still not being able to decouple Europe from the Russian nuclear industry 3 years into the war.

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#364

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

mpweiher wrote: post #340
pfdietz wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is being vastly outcompeted globally for new installations of power capacity by renewables. It's not even close. The only inference that can be drawn from this is that renewables beat nuclear in the market, that nuclear is the loser technology economically. Even in China, two orders of magnitude more PV comes online each year compared to nuclear (nameplate power, adjust by a factor of maybe 4 for levelized po…

If that's the only inference you can draw from that, you're not paying attention. First, you need to compare actual output, not installed capacity. Once you take into account capacity factors, it's not looking so good any longer. Second, if it were true that nuclear is being "out-competed", then nobody in their right mind would expand their nuclear capacity. Yet almost everyone except a few crazies and countries that…

I see an enormous amount of talk without money being spent. It is easy to say you "Consider nuclear power" when facing an energy crisis.

As soon as the bill hits the political discussions tend to turn.

See for example the Polish example:

> Poland plans to support this investment through:

> - (i) an equity injection of approximately €14 billion covering 30% of the project's costs;

> - (ii) State guarantees covering 100% of debt taken by PEJ to finance the investment project;

> - (iii) a two-way contract for difference (‘CfD') providing revenue stability over the entire lifetime of the power plant of 60 years.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

The subsidies to get a single reactor starting construction are absolutely bisarre.

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#365

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

scrlk wrote: post #142
datadeft wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people do not understand this and think that we can reall talk about nuclear vs solar when we really need to talk about an energy mix where you pick one point (for example you pick nuclear or solar) and the rest depends on this choice. Than you can calculate the price.

To add, it's worth reading the Levelized Full System Costs of Electricity paper: https://iaee2021online.org/download/contribution/fullpaper/1... Energy mix is key: the cost of 100% dependency on intermittent renewables is extremely high. Going for 95% dependency on intermittent renewables with the remainder being filled in by low-cost dispatchable generation halves system costs (see table 6, pg. 21).

So you've managed to cherry pick the one study showing nuclear power in any kind of possible light. Typical.

You do know that the study is only applicable to running your off-grid cabin from a sole source and battery storage based on 2020 costs. The study also assumes 100% uptime for nuclear power.

It does not deal with demand shifts, it does not deal with transmission, it does not deal with backup power.

It also managed to finds a nuclear LFSCOE of $106/MWh. Even though it doesn't adapt to peaks or breakdowns when Hinkley Point C sits at $170/MWh when running at full tilt for 35 years.

Whenever we do quality research on the subject the results end up being that nuclear power is horrifically expensive.

See for example:

See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.

> Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.

> However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.

> For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power":

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#366

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

datadeft wrote: post #45
jacobp100 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar + batteries is still cheaper than nuclear

In what timeframe? Solar panels last 20-25 years. Nuclear power plants last for 50+ years and use fraction of the space that solar. It is hard to believe that the TCO is lower. Usually people just looking at the price in the short term and comparing that. Batteries are a whole different can of worms. Super toxic and you need a high volume of those because the energy density is much lower. https://energyeducation.ca/e…

The lifetime difference is a standard talking point that sounds good if you don't understand economics but doesn't make a significant difference. It's the latest attempt to avoid having to acknowledge the completely bizarre costs of new nuclear built power through bad math.

CSIRO with GenCost included it in this year's report.

Because capital loses so much value over 80 years ("60 years + construction time) the only people who refer to the potential lifespan are people who don't understand economics. In this, we of course forget that the average nuclear power plant was in operation for 26 years before it closed.

Table 2.1:

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

The difference a completely absurd lifespan makes is a 10% cost reduction. When each plant requires tens of billions in subsidies a 10% cost reduction is still... tens of billions in subsidies.

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#367

Post by simion314 »

ben_w wrote: post #354
simion314 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real life is not as simple as you wish The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors, it can't be sent to a different region in the same village it is a grid limitation. Also when the weather is bad it is bad in a big chunk of Europe, sure in the South they will probably have nicer weather. What about the issue when everyone has solar? then who buys my extra production? Or if there is someone that can buy it b…

> The real life is not as simple as you wish The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors, it can't be sent to a different region in the same village it is a grid limitation. I would need to write something the size of a PhD thesis, not a comment, to fully describe the various possibilities and their trade-offs for even just the Italian grid, let alone the whole of Europe's. But to keep it simple, I can say that…

So are you expert in grids? is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?

About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.

I bought the panels because they were subsidized otherwise there would be more profitable to buy the energy, without subsidies and if energy will be cheaper or I would get paid to use it then solar panels would make no sense .

Imagine then a country that needs to over build solar panels, why would private sector accept this?

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#368

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

Fidelix wrote: post #245
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - Trump's actions are going to weaken the US's position on the world stage by pushing everyone else to provide for themselves what they had previously got from the US (security, advanced compute, etc). Trump appears to only think in short term transactional way - no long term strategy.

> pushing everyone else to provide for themselves what they had previously got from the US Did you write this, review it, then post it as if that's a bad thing? wow edit: grammar

The US has previously worked to help reduce nuclear proliferation partly by offering security in exchange (e.g. Budapest Memorandum whereby Ukraine gave up their nukes). Of course there's a short term (& short sighted?) benefit to the US if it can reduce the military budget significantly, and/or redeploy assets from supporting NATO partners to areas felt to be more important to current US interests, BUT this comes at a cost ... NATO members, and others - like Ukraine - believing themselves to be under a US security umbrella will now realize that such promises mean little to nothing - having an expiration date at the end of the US administration that negotiated them - and they have to take care of themselves. Is it really in the US's long term interest to have ROW more heavily militarized and more countries developing/proliferating nuclear weapons for their own protection?

As far as technology goes, putting a hard embargo on US exports of AI-supporting hardware is only going to further accelerate China's push to develop home-grown alternatives, and in a world where the US is isolating itself and new alliances are forming, such as China-Russia, this means that future US attempts to prevent cutting edge technology getting into the hands of others will be increasingly futile since these non-US alliances will support each other.

An isolated USA is in the end a weaker USA.

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#369

Post by ben_w »

simion314 wrote: post #367
ben_w wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real life is not as simple as you wish The energy I produce can only go to my neighbors, it can't be sent to a different region in the same village it is a grid limitation. I would need to write something the size of a PhD thesis, not a comment, to fully describe the various possibilities and their trade-offs for even just the Italian grid, let alone the whole of Europe's. But to keep it simple, I can say that…

So are you expert in grids? is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ? About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a…

> So are you expert in grids?

Interested amateur. I skim read the actual government and industrial reports, and know enough to be able to roughly estimate the effort required to construct precise answers.

> is it cheap to make it possible to get the electricity from homes, and resue or add new transformers to raise the voltage to medium then high voltage and use the same high voltage lines and whatever they use to get the energy from homes in Italy to homes in Romania ?

"Cheap" is already the wrong question: on this scale, energy is measured in percentage points of the economy, opportunity loss from what else can be done with the same resources, geopolitical exposure, not pure €, and that means questions like "is it cheap?" can only be considered against everything else the governments can do with the same resources — not even just other energy projects, absolutely everything, and how everything interacts with everything else, has to be taken into consideration.

Consider this: https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-c...

If you limit yourself to just €, the scenarios on page 7 say that improving the grid would:

• 2030: reduce wasted power by 2 GW while saving €5 billion per year in wasted energy

• 2040: reduce wasted power by 4.8 GW while saving €9 billion per year in wasted energy

While another pair of options on page 22 shows:

• €5.6 billion per year invested, returns of €9.4 billion per year

• €3.6 billion per year invested, returns of €8.6 billion per year

But! The report is also has a section header titled "Does the study consider the EU’s goal to reduce dependency on gas imports?" with several specific mentions of Russia throughout.

> About costs, if the solar panels will cost me 20 years of paying my bills but they will maybe break in 10 years then it is a waste of my money, I can buy the energy directly and lose less money.

When did you buy?

I think you're over-estimating the current price of PV by a factor of about 15-25 — here's one of my local supermarkets, this price pays for itself in about *one* year: https://www.kaufland.de/product/456527791/?search_value=phot...

I believe Italian electricity (you are in Italy, right?) is slightly cheaper than German electricity, but that's more than compensated for by having more sun.

Re: Italy moves to reverse anti-nuclear stance

#370

Post by rhubinak »

throw0101a wrote: post #347
rhubinak wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need for Russia to get involved. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium > The following countries are known to operate enrichment facilities: Argentina, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Iran, Japan, the Netherlands, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Great: but how much spare capacity do they have? A lot of these are primarily serving domestic needs. Heck, >25% of the US's uranium comes from Russia: * https://www.visualcapitalist.com/where-the-u-s-gets-its-enri... Being able to use "plain" uranium greatly expands your supplier options.

Because it's cheap. Russia needs money to wage war so it sells stuff. Again, nobody is wholly dependent on Russia.
Post reply on HN