Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online • Hacker News Board

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#381

Post by Ericson2314 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

hnarn wrote: post #371

eecc wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ignorants can - and will - proceed to piss away on terrace heaters to have drinks while having a smoke outside on the street

So what is your proposed solution? Outlaw non-renewable energy sources and simply let energy prices to go up by any amount?

Carbon Tax + "Carbon Dividend" (UBI) so that the vast majority of poeple's CoL does not go up at first but if they can reduce their car usage they can rake in the dough, is a nice first step.

See https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/decarbonizing-us...

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#382

Post by adfrhgeaq5hy » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #377

adfrhgeaq5hy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors cannot explode. It is not physically possible. It isn't even close to physically possible. Reactor-grade uranium is about 5% U235 while you need >90% to make something that can explode. May as well ask why we use wind turbines when they might take off and start dropping napalm.

> Nuclear reactors cannot explode. It is not physically possible. It isn't even close to physically possible. They can and they do (see: Chernobyl, Fukushima). But it's not a nuclear explosion (as you say, it's not possible with their fuel enrichment and geometry); it's a steam or hydrogen explosion.

Lots of things can go wrong and I certainly don't intend to downplay the risks. Mismanagement like at Fukushima or Chernobyl can do a lot of harm.

But there are a lot of people who think a nuclear reactor can level a city, which is totally impossible.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#383

Post by Factorium » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

schleck8 wrote: post #118

Factorium wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current wholesale electricity prices in Germany are $194/MWh: https://www.energylive.cloud/ How much does Germany spend on the military? Cancel it, and spend the money on nuclear power. Otherwise Germany has a significant strategic weakness (gas imports) to Russia, its only realistic enemy.

I don't think canceling an already tight military budget in favor of a power source that could be devastating when hit by an airstrike is a good strategy

Russia supplies 55% of Germany's natural gas imports. Cut that off and say goodbye to manufacturing, electricity, heating.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#384

Post by kensai » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

aagd wrote: post #104

The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a…

There are so many solutions for the safe storage problem and very little research. I believe if we think out of the box, the problem will be solved relatively easily and effectively.

Just bury them to hell: https://www.deepisolation.com/

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

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Post by kinjba11 » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 8:46 PM UTC

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #103

schleck8 wrote: post #59

It's worth noting that nuclear is really expensive when factoring in insurance and disposable, a lot more so than wind and solar. >The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-energy-nuclearpower/nucle...

We've literally just been through an entire energy crisis in Europe that was exacerbated due to inconsistent wind. https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Europes-E... The UK is suffering the most from the drop in wind power output, caused by mild weather. The country, which prides itself on its wind capacity and whose Prime Minister last year said wind farms could power every home by 2030, produced less t…

I'm reminded of the Tom Scott video mentioning how parts of the grid is simply not up to the task yet to get wind energy from high-wind areas into the mainland.

'The islands with too much power' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UmsfXWzvEA

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#386

Post by rb2k_ » Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

aagd wrote: post #104

The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a…

> A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price

People always mention that as an argument. I'm pretty sure that we could figure out a solution if we actually worked on it. Given how far we've come over the last 100 years, I don't see this as a problem that we couldn't solve over the next 100 years.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#387

Post by jhgb » Fri, Oct 15, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #367

jhgb wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Batteries are a bit of a red herring. The combination of pumped storage plants, overgeneration, and demand response already has you covered for at least two decades even in Germany. The minimal cost solution calculated for Germany assumes 1.6 GWh of storage for your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent for a 60% RE penetration scenario, only some of which needs to be batteries (Germany is currently at ~45% or so, many other co…

> (= by not consuming all the power you produce). This is a bit of a nitpick, but this is a physical impossibility. On a AC electric network, if the power input is higher than the power output, the frequency of the current goes up quite quickly, until the grid collapses (because there are security to avoid frequency deviation). You cannot “not consume all the power you produce”, all you can do is not producing as muc…

> This is a bit of a nitpick, but this is a physical impossibility. On a AC electric network, if the power input is higher than the power output, the frequency of the current goes up quite quickly, until the grid collapses (because there are security to avoid frequency deviation). You cannot “not consume all the power you produce”, all you can do is not producing as much as you could.

I probably should have said "all the power you could produce", since for example with photovoltaics you can produce at any moment any amount of power from zero up to the MPPT point on the I/V curve, depending on how much charge you remove from the panel. I hope this clears it up.

> Btw, I'm interested by the sources of your “1.6 GWh of storage for your 1000 MW nuclear” because it sounds really low to me

I used the figures in the 2018 Zerrahn et al. article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...

> I did a simulation[1] a while ago based on French data, for a 100% RE scenario and my calculation arrived at around 250GWh per GW of installed capacity.

Maybe you've just taken Sinn's approach instead of Zerrahn's? That number would seem to fit it.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#388

Post by Turing_Machine » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

mistrial9 wrote: post #347

Turing_Machine wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really sure what you're driving at here. While there are certainly other nuances involved such as what kind of radiation is emitted (alpha, beta, gamma, neutron), and what the immediate fission products are, if all other factors are equal, the longer the half life, the less radioactive the material is. That's literally the definition. The really nasty isotopes are ones like Iodine-131 (half-life 8 days, has a…

your half-life example is technically correct, yet by making a fanciful example of "forty million billion trillion" rhetorically, it makes the statement of harm sound like "oh, 21,000 years of half-life is not at all harmful" .. I think you are aware that spent nuclear fuel is poisonous by any definition. Second, the amount of material is not at all mentioned in your definition. One half of one gram of material, is n…

No.

When someone says "(a substance) has a (very large) half-life" it is typically an attempt to make the substance sound more dangerous, when in general a longer half-life makes the material less dangerous, not more.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#389

Post by silexia » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 2:00 PM UTC

aagd wrote: post #104

The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a…

Oil and gas plants are far worse. They kill tens of thousands TODAY and produce long lasting poisonous waste that affects everyone now.

Nuclear waste is easy to store and not voluminous compared to oil and gas waste. The US for example designated a waste mountain in Nevada that could store all of our waste but is not using it yet due to politics.

Nuclear is FAR safer than oil and gas and even the worst tragedies like Chernobyl or 3 Mile Island did a tiny fraction of the damage oil and gas to every year.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#390

Post by littlestymaar » Sat, Oct 16, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

jhgb wrote: post #387

littlestymaar wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (= by not consuming all the power you produce). This is a bit of a nitpick, but this is a physical impossibility. On a AC electric network, if the power input is higher than the power output, the frequency of the current goes up quite quickly, until the grid collapses (because there are security to avoid frequency deviation). You cannot “not consume all the power you produce”, all you can do is not producing as muc…

> This is a bit of a nitpick, but this is a physical impossibility. On a AC electric network, if the power input is higher than the power output, the frequency of the current goes up quite quickly, until the grid collapses (because there are security to avoid frequency deviation). You cannot “not consume all the power you produce”, all you can do is not producing as much as you could. I probably should have said "all…

> I used the figures in the 2018 Zerrahn et al. article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...

Thanks for the link !

> Maybe you've just taken Sinn's approach instead of Zerrahn's? That number would seem to fit it.

I wasn't aware of that paper (thanks again!), but from skimming Sinn's paper, our methodology seems to be pretty similar. I'm even more excited to read Zerrahn's paper now!