Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

energymonitor.ai

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#41

Post by m348e912 »

pydry wrote: post #34
bell-cot wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big picture, yes. Though they generally need much more power storage/distribution grid construction per GW, to actually deliver a reliable supply to users. Then you get to countries where the NIMBYs fight tooth & nail over even tiny grid construction projects...

Big picture is that theyre not just cheaper but 5x cheaper. In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity. Never mind all of the cheaper short term storage options (pumped storage, batteries). And this doesnt even account for the storage nuclear power would need (it's even less economic to use it for load following) or the n…

>> In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity.

Interesting. Never heard of this being done in practice before, do you have references of what you're referring to?

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#42

Post by perilunar »

weinzierl wrote: post #3

Decarbonising steel is a funny thing to say. Since steel is an alloy of iron and carbon it should mean turning steel into iron. Of course it is meant in a different way in the article.

yeah, but you turn pig iron and cast iron into steel by removing carbon, not adding it.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#43

Post by pydry »

m348e912 wrote: post #41
pydry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big picture is that theyre not just cheaper but 5x cheaper. In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity. Never mind all of the cheaper short term storage options (pumped storage, batteries). And this doesnt even account for the storage nuclear power would need (it's even less economic to use it for load following) or the n…

>> In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity. Interesting. Never heard of this being done in practice before, do you have references of what you're referring to?

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

It's not done at scale because we don't actually have that much spare renewable energy capacity. Whenever renewables power over 90% of current usage on one particular day anywhere it tends to hit the news.

Pretty much every MWh generated by green energy these days is just a MWh of natural gas extracted from the earth that is not burned. This actually means that while we use as much natural gas as we do that the economics of nuclear power are even worse by comparison.

The above study is a hypothetical solution to solar and wind routinely overproducing what batteries and pumped storage can keep up with. Even then it probably wouldn't make economic sense until natural gas extraction gets hit with import or carbon taxes. Just because it's cheaper than nuclear power that doesn't make it cheap.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#44

Post by nickpp »

pydry wrote: post #33
nickpp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those costs are because of onerous regulations and lack of competition due to... you guessed it: onerous governmental regulations.

If the ~$800 billion cleanup costs of a Fukushima event werent fully borne by taxpayers then maybe the safety regulations wouldnt have to be as onerous. But they are, and Ive never heard of a single pro nuclear advocate ever argue that nuclear power is safe enough that this enormous subsidy should be unwound. They generally pretend it doesnt exist. Meanwhile solar/wind/storage is a lot cheaper even without taking thi…

The cleanup after a nuclear incident is also regulated through the wazoo. Thus it's expensive, deeply corrupted and probably unnecessary. We'd probably be better off simply closing the area for a couple hundred years until the most radioactive (and thus dangerous) stuff half-lifes away.

Meanwhile coal plants keep spewing slightly radioactive ash into the air and into our lungs and the cost is paid by us all in life expectancy. And soon by our whole civilization in global warming.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#45

Post by pydry »

m348e912 wrote: post #40
pydry wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China builds nuclear power not because it is cheap but because it shares a lot of the costs and skills base of their nuclear military. Iran builds it because it wants the option of having a bomb. Take out military concerns and it is economic for neither of them. Every country who builds nuclear power stations is either a nuclear power sharing military costs (France, UK, China...) or is taking out an option on quickly…

>>China builds nuclear power not because it is cheap but because it shares a lot of the costs and skills base of their nuclear military. One of the previous commenters above mentioned that China abandoned their own plans bought their design from Germany, so it's conceivable that if China had no military nuclear program they could have still built a reactor. (That's of course if the western world allowed it)

Of course they could. Almost any country could.

Nonetheless, the cost to the constructor is such that without a military reason it doesn't make any sense to build one.

I expect North Korea will turn its attention to civilian nuclear power fairly soon now that the race to become a fully fledged nuclear power is complete. It would make economic sense to them given the industrial capacity, skills and resource base it has accumulated in the process of building the bomb. For most other countries? Not so much.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#46

Post by panick21_ »

locallost wrote: post #30
jpgvm wrote: post #5

All I am seeing is a ton of reasons to build an absolute boat load of cheap nuclear power. None of these processes are even remotely possible without abundant essentially free energy.

Cheap nuclear is an oxymoron. Germany dropped it and now the tax payers are hit with over 100 billion in nuclear waste disposal costs. The operators paid 23 billion to legally wash their hands of the mess [1]. The worst part even the green party accepted it because they feared the operators would simply declare bankruptcy since there was no way for them to handle it themselves. This on top of the hundreds of billions…

Nonsense. Had Germany adopted nuclear in 2020 for the Grünewende they would be done by now, and they would have cost them less then they actually spend in that time and what they will have to spend.

Even with pessimistic assumption of paying 5 billion $ per plant. If Germany had done what France did in the 70/80s they would be much better off now and for the next 100 years. And the cost per plant would be far lower once you start mass production.

If you actually did it right rather then incredibly stupidly, nuclear waste would be a resource for the future, and the idea of disposing it would be utterly ridiculous. Just as with all these idiotic disposal solution that governments like to waste money on. In typical fashion the anti nuclear people first create problems, demand that money is spend on them and then blame nuclear for those problems.

A sensible approach would be have a government fuel bank responsible for securing reserves of nuclear fuel, supplying and recycling nuclear fuel to the nations nuclear fleet. This fuel reserve centrally managed and it controls access to fuel for both commercial operates, research, ESA and so on.

Maintenance of spend fuel is not actually expensive and it places little burden on government to do, even if its for 100s of years. Its literally just a bunch of containers in a warehouse. And that could of course be supported by fees for rate payers.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#47

Post by panick21_ »

pydry wrote: post #33
nickpp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those costs are because of onerous regulations and lack of competition due to... you guessed it: onerous governmental regulations.

If the ~$800 billion cleanup costs of a Fukushima event werent fully borne by taxpayers then maybe the safety regulations wouldnt have to be as onerous. But they are, and Ive never heard of a single pro nuclear advocate ever argue that nuclear power is safe enough that this enormous subsidy should be unwound. They generally pretend it doesnt exist. Meanwhile solar/wind/storage is a lot cheaper even without taking thi…

Funny how anti-nuclear people never admit that the last 30 years of anti nuclear opposition have lead to 1000s of deaths, 100000s of people less health and more cost then any theoretical nuclear accident.

Its totally ok to argue that the government should have shared responsibility for health care. But arguing that government should control the energy production in a sensible way and adopt the risk for that is somehow crazy. And yet they end up doing it anyway as we have seen in the recent crisis.

Had the government simply adopted a nuclear strategy from the beginning it would be vastly cheaper, population would be vastly healthier, grid operation would be far easier and energy security for the next 100 years would not even remotely be in question. It wouldn't have forced the German right to make a devils deal with Russia and the Left would have gotten their carbon free grid.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#48

Post by panick21_ »

kolinko wrote: post #15
jpgvm wrote: post #5

All I am seeing is a ton of reasons to build an absolute boat load of cheap nuclear power. None of these processes are even remotely possible without abundant essentially free energy.

Renewables are way cheaper and easier to scale.

France transition from coal and oil to almost 100% nuclear in 20 years.

I'll wait here for any other country to do remotely as well with 'renewables'.

Lets see how Germany did after 20 years of their Green revolution ... mmhh yeah they would have done a lot better with nuclear.

Nuclear was the fastest scaling of any energy source ever discovered in the US. Faster then even oil. But then regulation changed and basically forced all plants to be totally re-engineered and new designs had to be made. At the same time coal became massively cheap and at that time the idea that a green source should have some kind of advantage was simply not viable.

Had nuclear given the same intensives as renewables, it would have been adopted in huge numbers. For example, a simple law that states all utilizes need some X% of nuclear would have totally changed the US. Renewables got that incentive, nuclear never did.

Re: The four-horse race to decarbonise steel

#49

Post by panick21_ »

> “A couple of years ago, they developed a proof of concept, but nobody’s heard anything from them since,” says Bataille. “The hope is they are close to hitting commercial scale.”

That kind of a strange thing to say. Boston Metal has been progressing just fine and have been sharing some of their progress online and are in talks with lots of different partners.

I don't think the industry is confused of where they are.

Post reply on HN