Activists who embrace nuclear power • Hacker News Board

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by rhodozelia » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:27 AM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #218

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…

Will we actually need five nines out of renewables any time soon? We have the option of hanging on to old fossil fuel plants as emergency power for many decades to come. Peaker plants already perform a similar sort of role. Our CO2 goals won’t be compromised by running emergency power off fossil fuel once every decade or two.

keeping old fossil plants sitting idle but in working order is possible but will cost nearly as much as generating at full capacity, minus the cost of fuel.

Imagine a car that sits in a garage and once a decade you take it out and thrash it. Machines degrade just from time not necessarily wear as rubber and gaskets become brittle, metal rusts, capacitors leak, fuel degrades, algae grows, rats chew on whatever they can, shafts and bearings and motors seize or get flat spots from sitting.

Look at Texas and their fleet of plants that didn’t start when they were needed. Any machine that is not running is likely to stay not running.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by stopping » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:30 AM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #325

elihu wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this context, solar and wind are atrocious and a total disaster because they have massive land-use requirements. No, they don't. There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. We'd consider a utility-scale solar array that's a couple square miles to be absolutely huge, but plo…

>There is a lot of empty land in the world that isn't useful for people to live in or to grow crops due to lack of rainfall, which also makes those sites more valuable for solar energy. There is no such thing as 'empty land'. Every square meter of Earth is part of some ecosystem that is under stress due to human activity. Solar and wind compound this problem. >then reduce that to 30 to account for night-time How abou…

>How about reduce that to 0 for night-time?

No, GP is averaging out across the whole day. If you get 100W during daylight and 0W during night, you can average to 50W for an entire 24-hour period. GP took 30W as a conservative estimate, which is entirely reasonable.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by throwawaygulf » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #374

throwawaygulf wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

San Francisco, LA, Seattle, etc. are all still magically there. Those "properties", where most of the GDP and people are, were relatively untouched.

So to say that "the entire West coast" was burning is objectively false, alarmist dribble.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by mlyle » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:31 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #327

macspoofing wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. It would be if it wasn't for the fact that nuclear power is incredibly energy dense so mining requirements for Uranium or Thorium or whatever iteration of nuclear we have, are not even in the same universe as what we will need to scale solar and wind. > But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar pane…

> Solar panels are not recyclable. Neither are wind mills I don’t understand why you say that. If a wind mill blade is made out of aluminium, it can be recycled as aluminium after it has been decommissioned. It being used in a high tech device doesn’t change that fact. Same if solar cells are primarily made out of glass and silicon, both could be recycled into anything else that requires glass or silicon. I also don’…

> Edit: ... Most parts of a nuclear power plant aren’t easy to recycle either,

A nuclear power plant is compact compared to the energy produced, and has an exceptionally long lifetime in comparison to current "renewables".

The components of a solar panel are individually recyclable, but that doesn't mean that anyone has really figured out how to recycle the actual finished panels in any kind of significant energy/resource saving way.

Similarly, the amount of fuel needed to be mined for nuclear energy is trivial, especially if one allows reprocessing.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by rhodozelia » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

cygx wrote: post #48

hntrader wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the point of nuclear to provide power when it's not sunny as a cheaper alternative to storage in batteries? If so then what's the purpose of comparing the cost of solar and nuclear as if they're directly competing for the same use case?

Nuclear reactors don't make sense as peaker plants, hence are not a battery replacement as such. You're correct that one should factor in the cost of storage if one wants to considers renewables as an alternative to nuclear for providing base load power.

Granted, I’ve never worked on a natural gas fired turbine, but I imagine every generator given the option would prefer to run consistentently at maximum output as that is how they would get the maximum ROI.

Hydro plants can adjust output but it changes river levels and flows with environmental consequences.

I imagine nuclear plants could use control rods to generate less power if they had to?

Or if you have the nuclear power because you need it anyway in case it isn’t sunny/windy but it is a sunny and windy day how do you decide if solar/wind or nuclear should be curtailed? Both have near zero marginal cost.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by brigandish » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:38 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #297

macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn…

> It’s disingenuous to…

This is an interesting thread but not applying the principle of charity to the person you're in discussion with, when they've done nothing worthy of putting charity aside, really lowers the tone.

There are a lot of other ways to put your riposte without questioning the motives of those responding to you simply because they or - even just a point they've made - disagrees with you.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by rhodozelia » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

throwaway894345 wrote: post #379

rhodozelia wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uh ... it does compete with farmed solar? Anyone deciding whether to buy power from the utility or generate their own is doing the analysis to see which “wins” the competition.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by acdha » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:42 AM UTC

BillyTheKing wrote: post #178

vlovich123 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is actually intentionally crippled through legislation under over-hyped concerns over dirty bombs accidents (for the right and left politically inclined respectively). Nuclear can be done safe, efficient, cheap and at-scale. All it requires is to allow for the secondary market of spent fuel like was originally started when nuclear first starting to get rolled out. The security concerns can be handled in other…

I used to be of the same opinion, but I gotta say that Fukushima really did have an impact on me (on the long-run, it didn't have an immediate impact). But I have been wondering, if an incredibly advanced nation such as Japan faces very serious issues with their nuclear power-plants, is it really the right choice? Can we really guarantee that nothing goes seriously wrong, ever? Cause that's the standard those plants…

This is especially worth considering in light of what recently happened in Texas. Say we get a really good setup: teams of nuclear and process engineers doing the best work of their careers, money is no object when it comes to safety, etc. and build infrastructure safe against once-in-10ky events and everything is executed perfectly.

All of that costs money, and sooner or later some MBA / politician is going to ask why we’re spending so much on something which hasn’t come anywhere near a major event – surely we’d be just as safe spending 10% less and using the money for something else like rewarding shareholders? Setting up governance structures which can resist that kind of pressure for millennia isn’t something we have much experience with.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by belorn » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

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…

> So the name of the game is now storage.

If I look at my own country (Sweden) at what is currently being planned on a political level and invested in, the name of the game is to use fossil fuels under a plethora of different schemes which hides the fact.

The first and primary scheme is to call the energy grid free of fossil fuel if the total amount of renewable energy being exported each year exceed that of imported fossil fueled energy. Find someone willing to buy the energy at some point in year, and you can subtract the numbers from fossil fuel usage during other parts of the year. In order to sustain increased capacity the government uses tax money to invest into better power line connections between countries for higher export and imports.

The second strategy is to use tax money to pay fossil fueled power plants directly, but rather than calling it a subsidy which would have a negative connotation, we call it "reserve energy plan". Fossil fuel plants first get paid for just being a fossil fuel plant that is ready to start the generators at demand, and then they can get paid a second time for any energy they do generate.

The third scheme is to use fossil fuels to create artificial fertilizers, grow and harvest biomass using machines that operate on fossil fuels, transport the biomass on ships that travel on fossil fuels, and then call it carbon neutral when we burn it.

Storage for wind farms (or the much smaller portion of solar that we have) is not being planned, invested or built. It is not being discussed on a political level. No tax money direct to it.

I would like it if storage was cheaper than the above schemes because then maybe they would go away. I do not want tax money to be given fossil fuel. I would prefer if a ultimatum was set in the energy sector so fossil fuels no longer is a possible choice. Under such ultimatum we would find out very quickly which of the choices between storage and nuclear is cheapest, and then it would hopefully see some actually investment.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by sir_bearington » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 1:48 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #373

sir_bearington wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There isn't remotely enough storage available to make renewables at all feasible for decarbonization. To put this in perspective 8 Gigawatt hours is just under one minute of storage for the United States' alone.

This is why pointing to the the raw generation costs of intermittent sources is misleading. Generating another 500 MW of solar energy doesn't actually represent any decarbonization if that energy is produced when demand is already saturated.