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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#371

Post by [deleted] »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #351
nicce wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that rare in general - if the U.S. opens the secrets of nuclear submarines - we had had mini reactors for decades.

Total non starter. Nuclear submarine power plants are not in any way a technology useful for utility scale power generation. To start with they use fuel enriched to weapons grade. They aren't cost effective vs the amount of power produced, and the designs don't scale up to utility scale power. Submarine plants are not some sort of miracle SMR we can just roll out. The Navy is willing to page cost premiums a utility c…

[deleted]

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#372

Post by johanyc »

pfdietz wrote: post #239
pil0u wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we wan…

Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

The core issue with renewables is reliability. Who cares it's cheap when it doesnt produce energy when I need it

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#373

Post by marcosdumay »

lucideer wrote: post #308
jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

> Sure, it might cost more I think this is more than good enough to be the "straight answer" you're looking for all on its own (& it's definitely not a case of "it might" - it definitely will). However, on top of the cost, there's three additional reasons: 2. It will take longer 3. It will need to be geographically distributed to an extent that will incur a significantly broader variety of local logistical red tape &…

> It will take longer

Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from?

Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#374

Post by Llamamoe »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #344
beeflet wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward

Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.

You need to look up how much nuclear waste is actually produced. It's a minuscule amount relative to the energy produced, and it doesn't actually need more than to be transported and then encased in concrete.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#375

Post by theptip »

javcasas wrote: post #366
theptip wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. And then you have bad faith actors. No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they? No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they? No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they? Finally,…

Agreed that lumpiness is an issue and so in practice you wouldn’t want to argue for coal levels of death-per-MWh.

This concern is, I believe, the crux of why folks are overly-conservative - the few well-known disasters are terrifying and therefore salient.

Plus it’s hard to campaign for “more risk please”. But we should bite the bullet; yeah, more of the stuff you list would happen. And, the tradeoff is worth it.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#376

Post by epistasis »

s1mplicissimus wrote: post #344
beeflet wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be cheaper to run a nuclear plant than a conventional power plant, due to lower fuel costs. But what kills nuclear is the capital costs of building the plant. It takes a while to reap the reward

Does that calculation include the cost of storing the nuclear waste after use? I'd be curious to see a reference for your claim.

Dry casting on site is fairly cheap.

The true cost of nuclear is the massive construction cost. We don't know how to solve that.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#377

Post by V__ »

mpweiher wrote: post #243
V__ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the fears are overblown, but at the same time the hype for nuclear is just weird. It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. Even the new hip small modular reactors are many years away. The LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) for solar with battery is already better than current solutions, and dropping. Wind and battery closely following. There is no way that nuclear technology w…

> It's more complex, more expensive, less adjustable and more risky. None of this happens to be true. A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one. Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less. And of course production is actually the smaller part of the cost of electr…

> A single nuclear power plant is big and complex, but the amount of electricity it produces is so much more than renewables that this difference vastly overshadows the first one.

It takes 10-20 years to build a new nuclear plant, if the goal is decorbanize the grid, then nuclear is to complex and slow.

> Last I checked, resource use and land use are at least 10x less.

True, but land use just isn't that important of a factor. Especially if roofs and other unused lands come into play. It just doesn't make much of a difference.

> (the grid) is actually the bigger part (60/40). This gets several times more expensive with intermittent renewables.

With the electrification of cars and so on, the grid has to be modernized no matter what.

> Intermittent renewables today generally only survive with massive subsidies both in production and deployment

Most of the time nuclear also doesn't pay for decommissioning and nuclear waste etc. by itself. At the same time a lot of renewable projects right now are also profitable without subsidize and this will apply to most in the near future. Especially when batteries become more widespread.

> What happens when you have more than 80% intermittent renewables in a grid we could observe in Spain.

The Blackout in Spain had nothing to do with renewables but happened due to a faulty substation.

> [...] Which brings us to adjustability: intermittent renewables are intermittent, you are completely weather-dependent and cannot follow demand at all. It is purely supply side. Or have you tried ramping up your PV output at night on demand? Good luck with that.

Grid scale batteries solve this problem.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#378

Post by jrk »

reenorap wrote: post #24

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

Many people see top-line rate increases and assume the issue is supply cost, but transmission and distribution have become over 50% of cost everywhere I’ve lived, and are growing fast, regardless of underlying generation or fuel costs. Distribution alone (the neighborhood/local grid) is now roughly matching the supply cost on my MA bill, and though I last lived in CA in 2019, I would be surprised if PG&E weren’t similar.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#379

Post by cyberax »

fundatus wrote: post #275
cyberax wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany will come around when their Green ship comes aground. Probably within the next ~5 years. The coal phaseout will happen, but only by replacing it with natural gas. It will result in the last easily achievable reduction in CO2, but it will also increase the already sky-high energy prices in Germany. After that? There's nothing. There are no credible plans that will result in further CO2 reductions. The noises a…

Coal phaseout is already 3+ years ahead of schedule in Germany without any government intervention because coal plants simply can't compete against renewables anymore.

Yeah. It's so great that Germany has to directly pay for gas power plants.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#380

Post by pyrale »

croes wrote: post #259
tietjens wrote: post #2

Article claims Germany is beginning to shift. I wouldn’t count on that. Despite having to import all of their energy aside from renewables, there is a wide-spread suspicion of nuclear here. The CDU made a lot of noise about it while they were in the opposition, but turning those closed plants back on is highly unlikely. Very costly and I’m not certain the expertise can be hired.

Still no storage for nuclear waste, long construction times and expensive as hell. Die you hear about the Söder-Challenge? The head of the bavarian CSU want to go back to nuclear energy and comedian Marc-Uwe Kling promised to praise him if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.

> if he finds and operator who is willing to build a nuclear power plant in Germany without any government subsidies.

So basically, be the only energy source not subsidized? There are plenty of decent reasons to be against nuclear, and there's a discussion to be had on its price, but pointing out subsidies in the energy sector is like casting stones from your glass house.

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