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A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

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Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#391

Post by ip26 »

eternauta3k wrote: post #375
ip26 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning natural gas to make electricity to run a heat pump isn’t elegant- but it is more efficient. We need a heat pump that is heat-powered…

There are old propane refrigerators which do exactly that (heat powered heat pumps). Have you done the math to check whether it's more efficient?

A natural gas furnace is up to 98% efficient. A natural gas turbine is 40-60% efficient; a modern heat pump can have a COP of 3 or even 4, for 150-200% equivalent efficiency (ballpark).

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#392

Post by yodelshady »

flgb wrote: post #217
yodelshady wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. sounds an awful lot like "renewables are not a viable form of energy and require gas". One gas replacement - nuclear - needs no backup. The other - renewables - needs backup of a scale that exists only on paper. I've asked time and again for costed *TWh-scale* storage, the proposals are never forthcoming. Because, on first principles, they're far too high and unlikely to ever decrease. Ask actual investors - which…

I understand you are trying to make a general argument, but those dynamics are definitely not true of Australia. Our state with the highest share of renewable energy, South Australia, has not seen gas use increase as renewables have replaced coal. The idea that 100% of all renewable capacity has to be ‘backed up’ with firm capacity is not true in general, and certainly not true in the specific case of Australia given…

Agreed, absolutely not true of Australia.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#393

Post by worik »

Galaxeblaffer wrote: post #112
worik wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing waste is too expensive to contemplate. Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales. So it must be monitored. For a hundred thousand years That would be us making future genera…

I'm pretty sure they'd rather deal with a bit of entombed nuclear waste buried deep in the ground instead of a dead, polluted and depleted planet.

Another way of avoiding a "dead depleted planet" is to not kill and deplete the one we have

Leaving piles of toxic waste - either nuclear or some other nefarious thing you are implying - is due to greed.

Can we deal with our greed?

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#394

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #389
pfdietz wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also determine, by optimization, what the most cost effective energy system would look like. If you do this you will discover that nuclear may not have a place in it. Of course you can set up a market system where nuclear is favored, but that would be a market system that would likely not be delivering the lowest overall cost solution to the optimization problem.

"May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible , not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear. At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enoug…

Look at this website

https://model.energy/

It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates.

Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear magical thinking. Yes, this time, the it-will-be-cheaper promise will be real, unlike all the other times it was a lie. At some point Charlie Brown the Nuclear Stan needs to realize Lucy is going to pull away the football again.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#395

Post by modo_mario »

flgb wrote: post #260
modo_mario wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is a more expensive sources of energy than our alternatives Not in the very long term. Upfront it's really expensive yeah. >(uranium ore is a small proportion of the cost stack, and Australia would still need to import nuclear fuel) A very small portion and isn't Australia a big exporter? Might as well set up refinement capabilities. >with very high levels of variable renewable energy where they have to be…

> What will be kept as backup for days with little production btw? Australia is different to Germany. We get high solar output every day, even in winter, and while we do get some wind droughts, they are less long and widespread than in Europe. We don't need to 'back up' anything close to 100% of our renewable capacity, and we don't need 'back up' for very long durations.

> We get high solar output every day, even in winter

Doesn't electricity usage vary quite a lot throughout the day? Especially in the evening.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#396

Post by modo_mario »

mrep wrote: post #387
modo_mario wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can make gas with electricity [0] And it is still extremely inefficient to my knowledge with some roadblocks towards improvement that are hard to overcome. Hydropump storage doesn't seem grand from an intuitive perspective but probably ends up doing better. >Here in the states nuclear is now about 3x as expensive as wind/solar Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or…

> Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better. The link I posted is from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which uses LCOE. It…

>Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees.

Which non carbon heating or energy source do you suggest? The US doesn't seem to be warming up to heatpumps much and it's not like those are grand in those extreme conditions. The insulation standards there from what i've heard and compared are still quite bad (Not helped by the fact that AC and pure heating solutions common involve lots of airflow)

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#397

Post by jamincan »

ncmncm wrote: post #268
jamincan wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear technology has never really matured to be industry-led, and is quite obviously heavily subsidized now; surely it's not inevitably always going to be that way though. At one time, the wisdom re: solar power was that PVs were simply far too expensive to be used for large-scale power, and yet, here we are now.

Nothing about nukes can be expected to get cheaper, unlike solar and wind. Nukes are just inherently expensive, from refining fuel through massive construction, disaster insurance (always and everywhere subsidized), maintenance, to decommissioning.

Wouldn't someone have said the same thing about PVs 20 years ago, though?

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#398

Post by DennisP »

pfdietz wrote: post #394
DennisP wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"May." I haven't seen anyone actually do that, have you? All I see are researchers ignoring nuclear and proving that an all-renewables grid is possible , not that it's cheaper than a grid including nuclear. At one point MIT had a US grid simulator online and I played around with it for a while. The cheapest fossil-free combination I found was solar and nuclear. Basically enough nuclear for nighttime demand, and enoug…

Look at this website https://model.energy/ It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates. Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear…

I'll spend some time with that, thanks!

Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear.

And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear.

Whether such cost reductions are feasible, we'll see. You may be right, but I'll note that we have never actually tried mass-producing lots of small passively-safe reactors, or done more than early experiments with MSRs. I'm glad there are companies and countries giving it a shot.

Edit2: Actually, even current production nuclear technology can get us there, if we follow the lead of the most effective countries. See figure 12 in this study of global nuclear cost curves: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#399

Post by mrep »

modo_mario wrote: post #396
mrep wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better. The link I posted is from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which uses LCOE. It…

>Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees. Which non carbon heating or energy source do you suggest? The US doesn't seem to be warming up to heatpumps much and it's not like those are grand in those extreme conditions. The insulation standards there from what i've heard and compared are still quite bad (Not helped by the fact that AC and pure heating solutions common invol…

I'm not suggesting we use a non carbon heating system. We already have methane furnaces all over the country, the storage for it, and the infrastructure to pipe it around. We just need to stop pulling it out of the ground and use electric -> methane power to gas which has a 51–65% efficiency range which combined with modern day furnaces that are 90+% efficient, is not too bad.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#400

Post by DennisP »

DennisP wrote: post #398
pfdietz wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at this website https://model.energy/ It models minimum cost combinations of renewables, batteries, and hydrogen to supply synthetic baseload given historical weather data (insolation, wind) in various places. It can also include nuclear (enable option "Dispatchable 2", which is based on EPR.) Twiddle the cost assumptions as you like to see what dominates. Passively safe small reactors are the latest in nuclear…

I'll spend some time with that, thanks! Edit: From some initial attempts, using their EPR costs does leave nuclear out entirely, in both the US and China. However, cutting the nuclear capital cost in half results in a grid that is completely nuclear. And it's not all or nothing. Reducing nuclear capital cost to 2/3 of the EPR value, the US gets a mix of sources with 63% nuclear. Whether such cost reductions are feasi…

Also, their default nuclear lifetime is 25 years, and we have many reactors older than that running right now. In my tests above I changed the lifetime to 60 years. Justification for that here: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...

For some countries, even the original capital cost of 6000 is viable with a 60-year lifetime. Two I tried are Thailand and, ironically, Germany, both of which went 100% nuclear that way.

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