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Activists who embrace nuclear power

newyorker.com

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#371

Post by f430 »

fulafel wrote: post #51
krustyburger wrote: post #6

When she first contemplated working at Diablo Canyon, she imagined the rat-infested Springfield Nuclear Power Plant on “The Simpsons,” where green liquid oozes out of tanks. Eventually, like Hoff, she changed her thinking. “What we were doing actually aligned with my environmental values,” she told me. “That was shocking to me.” You can tell from my username what an enormous fan of The Simpsons I am. One of the few t…

TMI (plus other 80s US NPP incidents) and Chernobyl had happened in the previous 10 years when Simpsons started. Those plants had real problems and caused badly needed corrections to NPP safety culture and standards. It was a pretty reasonable take for its time.

fukushima too caused an overreaction in Germany

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#372

Post by kragen »

ortusdux wrote: post #115
epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

I've done a fair amount of research into molten salt reactors, and if we can solve the containment issue they should be very cost effective. The molten salts are extremely corrosive, which cuts their lifespan down to ~5 years. Newer designs should reach 10 years and there is extensive research into designing systems that will last 20+ years. They should be much cheaper to build and operate because they have several i…

I like molten-salt reactors, but they still depend on steam turbines† and cooling systems to convert the heat into useful energy. So they don't help to solve the fundamental cost problem Epistasis identified: although they might reduce the gap between high nuclear-plant cost and low coal-plant cost, but they won't cross the Rubicon to even lower solar-plant cost.

________

† which operate at substantially more than one atmosphere!

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#373

Post by kragen »

sir_bearington wrote: post #365
zaik wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that nuclear has existed for quite some time now and hundreds of very costly plants have already been built, how much more cost-effectiveness can we expect? It feels like the current state is exactly what "larger investments" in nuclear get you.

Nuclear was considerably cheaper when it was built at scale. Both the US during the 70s and France both built plants at a cost of 1-2 billion per GW. Which, in the context of 24/7 carbon-free energy is fantastic.

It was fantastic for the 1970s, but it's not low enough to be competitive with current PV pricing, even with storage.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#374

Post by pvaldes »

throwawaygulf wrote: post #345
gdubs wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Pinker’s book — I’m familiar with the argument. I also think it looks at a data point (now) and compares it to the long tail of history, and says, “things are great!” I’m not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction. And I’m an optimist. There have been warning signs flashing “systems failure” for a little while now, like a “check engine light” p…

>I'm not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction. Crime was near all-time highs in the US, Europe's deadliest war since WWII was raging, numerous civil wars in Africa and elsewhere were claiming millions... It's clear it's way better, and definitely got better since your arbitrary timeline. >I don’t think there’s been a year in modern history like 2020…

> Less than 50 people died.

The number of people dying in a wildfire is not a good measure of its impact in the life or properties of everybody living in the area.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#375

Post by ashtonkem »

dismayedjim wrote: post #340
screye wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem. The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets…

You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".

You’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust.

People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#376

Post by rhodozelia »

smallnamespace wrote: post #192
slfnflctd wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Attaching four hours of storage to a solar generation farm, just enough to get through the duck curve, is now slightly cheaper than coal This completely ignores scenarios of extended cloud cover, cold temperatures and low wind (somewhat like we just saw in Texas) where properly winterized baseline power would be the only way to keep everything up the whole way through. Barring future unknown tech, we will always ne…

If your grid covers a large region and you have sufficient transmission, then somewhere , there is excess electricity from wind/solar that you can bring in. Remember, we're talking about a world where building renewables to 4x peak demand would be actually economical. This works on the same principle as an insurance market: it's likely that even at 4x capacity, your local solar farm has a few cloudy days. It's highly…

I don’t foresee anybody paying for all this over built over provisioned solar/wind generation and transmission. I suppose if it has to be overbuilt 4x to be as reliable as the power system we have now then my power bill will be 4x more.

When people quote $1/W for solar generation it really should be $4/W because you have to build 4x as much and then add another ... infinite amount for increasing the size of the transmission system by 4x too so that areas that have sun can transmit to areas that have none. All possible just expensive.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#377

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaygulf wrote: post #345
gdubs wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Pinker’s book — I’m familiar with the argument. I also think it looks at a data point (now) and compares it to the long tail of history, and says, “things are great!” I’m not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction. And I’m an optimist. There have been warning signs flashing “systems failure” for a little while now, like a “check engine light” p…

>I'm not sure if you look at the curve’s derivative since, say, 1995, it’s clear we’re heading in a good direction. Crime was near all-time highs in the US, Europe's deadliest war since WWII was raging, numerous civil wars in Africa and elsewhere were claiming millions... It's clear it's way better, and definitely got better since your arbitrary timeline. >I don’t think there’s been a year in modern history like 2020…

[deleted]

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#378

Post by tedk-42 »

rpiguyshy wrote: post #341
tedk-42 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you see it as one or the other as opposed to investing in BOTH solutions and trying to adopt both technologies for the better. It seems like we should put all our eggs into one basket but why? If people realised how 'anti-nuclear' they actually were, things would move along faster.

well for the record i am not saying we should have zero nuclear. i think we need nuclear waste products to power rovers, do certain medical diagnostics and we need nuclear subs to keep the chinese at bay.

A giveaway of your position on nuclear science usage is if you associate nuclear with 'defence' or war-like capabilities.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#379

Post by throwaway894345 »

rhodozelia wrote: post #364
throwaway894345 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could make the same argument about communal water heating versus having a heater in each home, yet of course such a position would be absurd. If we could cheaply and efficiently transport hot water over miles and miles like we can with electricity then communal water heating would be much more common. Note that communal water heating is fairly normal (i.e., not "absurd") in large apartment, condominium, and com…

Given that residential customers pay quite a bit more than the wholesale rate for power rooftop solar must be an investment that pays for itself or nobody would do it!

No one is disputing that it pays for itself, but that doesn’t mean it competes with farmed solar.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#380

Post by arrosenberg »

conradev wrote: post #339
arrosenberg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear fuel is several orders of magnitude more energy dense than solar or wind, so the amount of fuel required is shockingly low, especially compared to how many resources all those panels and windmills require to build and transport. > How much land solar and wind farms use seems kind of minuscule next to all these efforts. And given how urgent the climate disaster is, complaining about land use from solar farms s…

> The 100 acre solar farm you build instead of a 1 acre Nuclear plant is going to have its' own environmental and maintenance challenges What specific environmental and maintenance challenges? Solar farms are incredibly low maintenance. The land is graded before construction if it is not flat enough and besides that the only maintenance required is: - Cleaning the panels periodically - Replacing broken equipment Top…

Cleaning the panels periodically on that size farm means continuous maintenance, especially in the desert, where most people seem to want to put them. If you clean them with water, that's going to have to come from somewhere (I'm not sure if high pressure air would be good enough). In utility terms 25 years isn't that long. Nuclear plants are good for ~80 years, so you'd need to 2-3x the capital costs right off the bat. I'm not under the impression we have storage where it needs to be either, so that's additional cost + infrastructure that's already baked into nuclear.

Grading the land destroys the existing ecosystem, and putting panels on top of the ground will obviously have an impact on that area of the biome. Deserts are important ecosystems, and if we thoughtlessly destroy them to build solar farms, we'll have to deal with the consequences 30 years down the road. I'm not against solar farms, I'm just not religious about them. They have downsides and there is a lot of money to be made, so it's worth being weary of magic bullets.

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