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Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

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Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#381

Post by int0x2e »

cycomanic wrote: post #280
DennisP wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I got to sit in a meeting between reps from a bunch of GenIV reactor startups, and a former chair of the NRC (not Jaczko). The reactor people said their main problem was that the NRC required near-complete blueprints before they would even look at a design. Getting to that point took several hundred million dollars. Then the NRC would give a flat yes or no. If no then you were out of business. That's…

So if I want to build a house I have to come to the building authority with blueprints and ask if that building design is OK. I can't just ask step by step: is it OK if I use these walls, these windows... And build up my house like that. Why would that be different for a nuclear regulatory body? Moreover, they are designing new reactor technology much more complex and less understood than a house. I imagine for safet…

I think all they want is to use modern, iterative development principles. It's fine to have the final 'yes' take the full lump sum and a 'no' being a real possibility. What they want is to be able to get multiple opportunities to fail and get a 'no' earlier in the process, when the stakes are smaller. While your building analogy is nice, I'll propose a different one - pharmaceutical companies face a similar, lengthy, expensive regulatory process, but a new treatment doesn't just go from a single prototype to human trials - there are many steps, costing more and more as you get closer to certification, and each can block the entire thing. We need a similar path for new nuclear designs if we want to be able to live on this planet for long.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#382

Post by ZeroGravitas »

uranium wrote: post #66

"Recently, places as diverse as Texas, California, Oklahoma/Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska (SPP), the UK, and Germany have rapidly decarbonized without nuclear." Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack]. "The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...

This graphs shows the carbon intensity of their electricity dropping for years. There's a small uptick in the estimated number for the most recent year, but even with that it's a massive drop, so where is the recarbonization you mention?

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#383

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #158
pfdietz wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you choosing a meaningless metric to decide on the technology? Utilities or consumers don't care about energy density of fuels, they care about cost.

High energy density can in principle matter, a lot, from a societal point of view. If you only need a tiny amount of fuel to make the world's energy, then the overall impact on land, minerals, ecosystems, wildlife, etc. can potentially be very small, assuming you deliver the rest of the fuel cycle and reactors with reasonably small footprints as well. The fact that current markets don't yet value these things is more…

A sackcloth and ashes approach to civilization, where nuclear's low land use is preferred because we're also going to (for example) ban agriculture because it uses land, is a nonstarter. Society has decided that agriculture is ok, because the concerns of people are more important than the putative concerns of unfettered nature. And if agriculture is ok, so is the land use of PV and wind (which produce much more value per unit area than agriculture does.)

(A similar argument applies to materials. Compare the materials used by a renewable energy system to the materials used by industrial society as a whole.)

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#384

Post by ZeroGravitas »

kyrra wrote: post #138
JoeyBananas wrote: post #122

It has nothing to do with economics, nuclear energy is stagnant because the industry is a regulatory hell. From eia.gov: Of the 104 operating nuclear power reactors in the United States: The last construction permit for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1978 for Progress Energy Inc.'s Shearon Harris plant, near Raleigh, North Carolina. The last operating license for a nuclear power plant was issued in 1996 to the T…

Not an expert here, but from a commentary piece from 2021: https://www.wsj.com/articles/nuclear-regulatory-council-nrc-... > In 1957 the internationally recommended limit for radiation exposure was about 15 times the natural background radiation that people absorb from rocks and cosmic rays. Without evidence of harm from exposures within the 1957 limits, the U.S. had by 1991 ratcheted its public limits down to less t…

Maybe low carbon power sources like nuclear would have done better if the WSJ hadn't been telling people that Climate Change didn't exist/wasn't a problem/wasn't caused by humans/was being pushed by communist beaurocrats for their own devilish purposes.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#385

Post by legulere »

ulfw wrote: post #234
jillesvangurp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany Actually, Germany did not have a long term increase in coal/gas due to the nuclear shut down but a decrease. Coal has been in a slow but steady decline in Germany (mainly due to cost); which is on track to decline all the way to 0 as Germany is committing to getting rid of coal based production completely by 2035 or so. Gas production did grow but mainly to offset decli…

Germany has one of the highest electricity costs on the planet. That leads to reduction of use (as people just can't afford it) and this is before the Russian corrupt cheap gas deals. Who knows what it'll look like with higher gas and oil prices.

Only for household consumers, for instance because there's a special tax on household electricity to get people to use less electricity: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromsteuergesetz_(Deutschland...

For none-household consumers it's the same as the EU average: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

At the same time Germany has one of the most reliable electricity nets with less outages than other countries.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#386

Post by pfdietz »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #150
pfdietz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only handles (some) actinides. It doesn't handle fission products, seven of which have very long half lives.

You can partition the LLFPs into special irradiation targets and transmute them to short-lived things if you really want to, also in fast reactors. I'm still a bigger fan of stable geologic disposal. https://www.iaea.org/publications/7112/implications-of-parti...

No one has done that. It's not clear it can be done reasonably or economically. You'd have to isotopically separate the LLFPs from stable isotopes of the same elements.

I will say that if those LLFP can be separated, it's probably simpler and cheaper to just shoot them into space for disposal.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#387

Post by ZeroGravitas »

This is a good summary article. It appears many commenters haven't read it so here's the key paragraph:

"Even if you think that natural gas should be banned or taxed away, nuclear will still end up uncompetitive. By the time you finish a single LWR, investors will build enough solar and storage to eat high daytime electricity rates. If you assume current nuclear plant operating costs and a very optimistic OCC then only a modest decline in cost makes solar + storage cheaper for 24/7 power. Solar and batteries have declined over 90% in price over the last decade, and the learning curve powering growth looks to continue."

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#388

Post by barrenko »

croes wrote: post #263
ulfw wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has one of the highest electricity costs on the planet. That leads to reduction of use (as people just can't afford it) and this is before the Russian corrupt cheap gas deals. Who knows what it'll look like with higher gas and oil prices.

That would be a strange corruption that causes cheap gas

It is corruption 101.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#389

Post by geysersam »

dsnr wrote: post #296
cschwarm wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Also, in the German climate and with its many 'old' buildings, merely switching the heat source won't do. One also needs additional isolation, and new radiators. [1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/heating-40-millio...

> You can't convert about 40 million households [1] in a year or two. Who's talking about a year or two? Germany has been pushing for russian gas since the 90's, against all logic.

It's against logic if your only consideration is geo politics. And even then, many have argued economic cooperation builds peace and security through mutual trust and dependency. In the light of current events, this way of thinking has been discredited, but it's far from self evidently irrational.

Re: Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

#390

Post by superlopuh »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #382
uranium wrote: post #66

"Recently, places as diverse as Texas, California, Oklahoma/Iowa/Kansas/Nebraska (SPP), the UK, and Germany have rapidly decarbonized without nuclear." Uh...Germany's actually recarbonized by shutting down their nuclear [increasing coal and imported electricity to pick up the slack]. "The nuclear electricity production lost in Germany's phase-out was primarily replaced with coal electricity production and electricity…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity... This graphs shows the carbon intensity of their electricity dropping for years. There's a small uptick in the estimated number for the most recent year, but even with that it's a massive drop, so where is the recarbonization you mention?

That site doesn't mention whether it's the intensity of electricity consumed or produced, when Germany imports electricity it tends to be from countries with higher carbon-intensity production[0]

[0]: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE

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