Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market • Hacker News Board

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#401

Post by Manuel_D » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 4:55 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #398

Manuel_D wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And which solution is that? Lithium ion batteries? To put this in perspective, global lithium ion battery output [1] annually doesn't amount to 1 hour's worth of US electricity usage (500 GWh). Hydroelectric storage? You essentially need to repurpose an alpine lake as a dam. That's geographically dependent, and it's dubious it'd scale well as viable hydro sites become more and more remote. The remaining things like e…

Obviously not lithium batteries. Even suggesting it demonstrates you are not serious. And, obviously hydrogen will not continue to be made from hydrocarbons. It will instead be feedstock for synthesizing hydrocarbons. Carbon would need to be extracted from air, or at least from exhaust, to get carbon credits.

What you're describing is a combination of electrolysis and the Sabatier process [1]. And as I explain before there are major obstacles to actually converting electricity to methane at scale. It needs a source of carbon, and extraction of carbon from the air or exhaust is not feasible. Furthermore, massive electrolysis of hydrogen is also not something we have been able to do. Almost all hydrogen is produced through carbon-emitting steam reformation [2].

In short, converting electricity to methane and then back to electricity again is not a presently available option and it's unclear whether it'll ever be viable at stale. Grid-scale energy storage remains an unsolved problem

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#402

Post by acchow » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:02 AM UTC

Gwypaas wrote: post #386

acchow wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

13 years? Korea has built plenty of reactors in 5 years

Easier when you cheat on the documentation. Sitting on two chairs at the same time is hard. > In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea du…

Thanks for this.

I'm curious how many scandals are involved with similar projects taking twice as long to complete in Europe. Or projects taking 4 times as long to complete in the USA? Fewer scandals? More scandals? Worse scandals? I have no idea.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#403

Post by Manuel_D » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:03 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #374

liketochill wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

Grid solar is statistically significantly safer than Nuclear. Climbing on rooftops can be dangerous, but solar is much better in a dessert than on top of a roof. Nuclear takes longer, is more expensive, has lower ROI, and higher risks. Solar has a lower capacity factor, but having 1/3 the availability at 1/15th the cost is a net win. Especially as we need vastly more power in the daytime and idling Nuclear is really…

Nuclear is over 4x safer than solar [1]. As far as "not having the time", we'd still be using natural gas to accommodate wind and solar's intermittency unless some breakthrough in storage technology happens. Batteries are mostly going to go to vehicles, not grid scale plants. Other storage solutions like thermal batteries, compressed air, or giant flywheels remain in the prototyping phase and aren't even proven to be viable at scale.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#404

Post by Manuel_D » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:08 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #391

secondaryacct wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for the people who would have liked to drink the water used to clean the panels (cf the projects in deserts). Everything has some drawbacks and it s useful to diversify.

Your off by orders of magnitude. Nuclear uses vastly more water than solar power per kWh. “Nuclear Energy consuming roughly 400 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, 320 billion gallons of water were consumed by United States nuclear power plant electricity generation in 2015.” And that’s direct consumption in cooling towers, nuclear indirectly uses power in other ways. By comparison the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight pr…

Most of the water used by nuclear is used to run the heat exchangers, and gets dumped straight back into the river it's drawn from. This looks like it's the source you're quoting [1]. It's pretty clear that nuclear power is a tiny fraction of water usage [2]. Furthermore, in water-constrained areas nuclear plants can be cooled with wastewater [3]. And lastly, plenty of nuclear plants are cooled with ocean water, which obviously has zero shortage.

The notion that nuclear power is going to significant affect water supplies is without merit.

1. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/styles2/#:~:tex....

2. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/styles2/images/...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#405

Post by gigatexal » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:13 AM UTC

Nothing like an aggressive Russia and a war in your neighborhood to kickstart your move towards energy independence. I like seeing this. We should see more plants announced across Europe as part of a push along side wind and solar to diversify energy production. Advancements in nuclear plant design and such have made them cheaper and safer, too.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#406

Post by Manuel_D » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:14 AM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #222

jdavis703 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly this is cheaper than paying people to buy your electricity (as sometimes happens in California because of solar plants).

Since solar panels can go to zero output onto the grid instantly, this is just a matter of improper design (of the equipment, or of the regulatory regime.) In any case, the cost/kWh from nuclear is computed assuming it's running flat out (except for refueling outages). Reduce that generation and the levelized cost increases. It's already very much higher than renewables; curtailing nuclear output would make that disc…

Granted, the cost for solar and wind fail to account for the cost of storage to accommodate their intermittency. If your country has hydroelectric dams, then that works. But for the rest that don't have the right geography for hydro, they burn fossil fuels.

Nuclear provides a path for decarbonization. Solar and wind do not, until a massive breakthrough in energy storage is invented. And nobody knows when that will happen, or if it will happen.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#407

Post by antupis » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:23 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #385

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar works great in some countries, but Finland? I just don't see it working out there.

Yea, though apparently they get 0.3% of their electricity from solar which seems crazy to me.

Actually you need to go southern france northern italy that you get higher solar potential https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PV-solar-electricity-pot... big problem is that when you need most electricity(winter) solar is basically 0.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#408

Post by chmod775 » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:34 AM UTC

clusterfish wrote: post #372

wbl wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other sources produce less because they can. Since nuclear has a high capital cost and low variable cost it bids low.

Coal and gas sure, but renewables are obviously dependent on weather. Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can". When there is significant oversupply of energy from solar, it gets sold for pennies on the dollar to neighbouring regions, and when the sun doesn't shine, you're sol.

>Nobody runs their solar panels less than maximally possible "because they can"

Energy prices can be negative when there's not enough load but too much supply. Not every power source can be just switched off.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#409

Post by chii » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:42 AM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #397

chii wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not a waste if the receiver of the service is paying for the service.

That’s… not the definition of waste. Have you ever worked at a big corporation? They pay for some stupid useless shit just because it’s nobody’s job to stop paying for the service.

> They pay for some stupid useless shit

and who's to judge it was useless? If you're the one paying, then you can make this judgement. Otherwise, you're merely putting your own moral values above someone else's.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#410

Post by ck2 » Sun, Mar 13, 2022, 5:59 AM UTC

bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

What's their waste disposal plan? Apparently the way the USA does it is a nightmare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...