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Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#391

Post by WhompingWindows »

macspoofing wrote: post #246

We're going to have to build up our Nuclear infrastructure eventually because outside of fossil fuels, geothermal and hydro (both of which need particular geography so they can never be the final answer) there is nothing else. Unfortunately the cultural push is for wind and solar, so it looks like we're going to have to give wind and solar the 'old college try' and lose precious decades before we realize we need nucl…

Your post reads oddly anti-renewables. You can't genuinely discuss energy and renewables in 2021 without mentioning battery storage -- so many procurements now are packaged solar/batteries. No one suggests pure wind/solar, but rather batteries as a 3-4 day short-term storage system. Yes, long term storage is needed, that is an acknowledged sticking point that many companies are looking at. There is in fact evidence that solar is beneficial to some ecosystems it's installed in, and it certainly adds value to homeowner's houses too. But with batteries, you unlock the next level for renewables.

With these batteries in hand, you don't need new base-load nuclear power, it's much slower and harder to build, in terms of regulatory and complexity issues, and it's going to cost you a lot more -- see the debacle in South Carolina and their wasted money on a failed nuclear plant. The only place really building new nuclear is China, but why would the US when electricity demand growth is largely flat in recent years and only smaller bits of incremental additions are needed to replace retiring or dirtier plants? Where do you see nuclear fitting in, which design to be used, and how will it be funded?

Compared to solar/wind/batteries, there's simply nothing as cost-effective at stopping climate change.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#392

Post by selimthegrim »

epistasis wrote: post #189
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 I were in Texas last week, I would have loved to have a home solar system with a battery that let me island from the grid. This is definitely practical and happening even at today's high prices. In a decade, ERCOT will look nothing like it does today. It will have massive amounts of solar and storage, and even more wind. This is replacing gas plants as they age out.

You would think that but some municipalities like New Orleans are addicted to the franchise taxes from new gas plants and roll over for the utilities (I am speaking about the South in general)

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#393

Post by selimthegrim »

airhead969 wrote: post #69
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 worked in nuclear. There's definitely no way now to insure a new plant and make money. Try as they may, even Duke couldn't break ground on any new US project because there hasn't been money in it for about 40 years. The economics kill it and there aren't going to be anymore PWR/BWRs, with the possible exceptions of BCH, 2 PWRs at Turkey Point, and 1 ESBWR at North Anna. Renewables will likely undercut them all to c…

Will anyone ever finish VC Summer? Maybe after they will have done Vogtle right?

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#394

Post by Vecr »

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 can't even wipe out a continent with a fusion bomb, how would a nuclear power plant even have enough material to be that damaging? Yeah, it might spread a bit of radiation if the entertainments cracked open like an egg, but that would be very obvious if terrorists, say, were trying that.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#395

Post by StillBored »

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…

The costs of wind/solar are basically lies. The numbers are based on best case generation and fail to account for storage, and overbuild requirements to supply that storage.

AKA today you say wind is X dollars a MWh, but in order to actually be free of NG or other fossil fuels it needs to be built at some multiple of total demand (say 3X) to compensate for low periods. Then there you need sufficient storage (4 hours is a joke) to smooth it all out. In the end the actual cost is ballpark an order of magnitude more per MWh if one actually tried to run 100% renewables.

You need only dig up the recent TX ERCOT generation numbers to see just how useless wind/solar can be. It was functioning at less than 1/10 of its installed capacity for the entire week. During most of the winter months its a good 1/3 of its summer peaks/etc. And that is one of the leading wind providers in the entire world.

Nukes are really the only technology we could deploy in the next 5-10 year to completely eliminate CO2 production in the electricity grid. Build enough of them to supply peak generation and rather than trying to load follow use the excess energy for syngas production via CO2 recapture and it would be possible to turn a part of the vehicle fleet carbon neutral as well.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#396

Post by selimthegrim »

philipkglass wrote: post #157
rrdharan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there still a lot of implied waste from the solar panels themselves though, as well as the storage batteries i.e. once they’ve reached their end of life? My understanding is that this cost and the manufacturing cost (rate earth metals etc.) are often overlooked when reasoning about the total footprint of both solar and electric vehicles..

rare earth metals etc. The rare earth elements are the lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium [1]. None of these elements are needed to manufacture solar panels. The only rare metal used in quantity by solar panels is silver, which is used to make electrically conductive pastes for cell contacts [2]. The question of what resources solar panels require is deliberately muddied by a couple of vested interests. 1) Junior…

Hafnium is used in some next generation MEG solar cells, to say nothing of ITO electrodes

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#397

Post by justatdotin »

macspoofing wrote: post #276
brightball wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. We have a lot of parking lots out there. IMO the model used for parking at Lego Land looks like the ideal approach for solar expansion to me.

>The thing about land use that always got me was that solar can be implemented as a roofing system in parking lots. That's not enough. Rooftop solar panels on a single family home roof cannot provide adequate power for even that family (forget even trying to use appliances like washer/dryer/stove when on solar, much less charging your electric car). And if they cannot do that, then how the hell are they going to prov…

yeahnah,

ever since putting panels on my roof a few years ago I've got kinda slack about consumption (I got a second fridge, and I now run aircon whenever I feel like it) while still producing ~2x my needs. My home has a pool pump and a very busy washing machine.

Solar panels on my roof provide so much excess power that when my family next buys a car, we'll be able to power it too.

lots of homes in my neighbourhood have same, and I see big banks of panels on churches, schools and shopping centres.

solar is totally up for it. Yes there are plans in my region to build large plants, but that's more about capitalising on new abundant cheap energy than your false claim of rooftop shortfall.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#398

Post by kragen »

sir_bearington wrote: post #390
kragen wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Apparently you haven't done the math on this, but I did: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/lithium-supplies.html

Summary of conclusions:

It seems likely that known concentrated lithium deposits will not be sufficient to permit the transition to solar over the next decade or two, but there is plenty of lithium in seawater and other, less-concentrated deposits to permit such a transition. New extraction technologies will be needed if lithium batteries are to bridge the intermittency gap. Alternatively, some of the other utility-scale storage technologies might be developed.

However, independent of the above, your assertion, "Generating another 500 MW of solar energy doesn't actually represent any decarbonization if that energy is produced when demand is already saturated," is also incorrect. Generating another 500 MW of solar energy to satisfy demand currently being satisfied by coal, oil, or gas allows us to turn off coal, oil, and especially gas plants more often, which does actually represent decarbonization. It's only during hours when 100% of demand is being satisfied by solar energy that generating another 500 MW of solar energy doesn't represent decarbonization — and then only until utility-scale storage or demand response can suck up the zero-marginal-cost energy. Or until carbon emissions are net negative, of course.

It's quite plausible for demand response (e.g., charging your Tesla or freezing water in your refrigerator when the sun is shining) to play a bigger part in this than utility-scale energy storage, due to the much lower incremental costs. But my calculations linked above show that there is ample lithium in seawater to do it purely with utility-scale battery storage facilities, even without falling back to pumped storage, demand response, trains full of concrete, compressed-air caverns, etc.

Calculemus.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#399

Post by throwaway894345 »

rhodozelia wrote: post #387
throwaway894345 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn’t call 2-3X the price “competition” and whether people were buying rooftop solar doesn’t refute the cost analysis.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#400

Post by selimthegrim »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #318
macspoofing wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are vastly overstating the mineral requirements. No I didn't. A typical solar panel weighs around 40 pounds. All that material has to be mined from somewhere, then transported, then processed. Some of that material are rare earth minerals that have an outsized mining requirement (like for every 1 pound, you need to turn over 1000 pounds or 10000 pounds of earth). All of that material will need to be landfilled a…

> No I didn't. Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it. Rare earth magnets are used in some wind turbines, but alternatives exist there. That does change the cost calculations a touch, but not enough to invalidate the viability of a renewables + storage solution. > I'm saying that you will need vast new tracks of land regardless of that fact. People have done the math. Land availabilit…

>Yes. You did. Solar panels do not use rare earth minerals. Go google it.

Some new designs do call for hafnium

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