421–430 of 619 posts
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Also let's not forget the problem of burnt fuel storage. Burned nuclear fuel will stay radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Unless we plan to offload the cost of storage to future generations - which we actually do now - nuclear power is horribly unprofitable.
As far as I've heard, newer designs can reuse this spent fuel but there's no political will to go forward with it for some reason.
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> solar + storage providing power evenly over 24h (an unrealistic worst case) becomes economical. That's not the the worst case. Solar output varies by season. So you have to have enough storage for multiple weeks. This also means you have to greatly over-provison solar panels so that they not only provide power, but also enough to charge batteries.
No, you don't need storage for multiple weeks, that would be silly. Solar is so cheap now that already panel generation capacity is frequently getting oversized compared to the potential inverter output, to maximize costs. Future solar farm design will optimize seasonal generation capacity similarly; size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries, and you can have year round output of a firm amount with…
You have seasonal, and inter-seasonal variability in a solar and wind output. You need to account for that, in an economy that requires orders of magnitude more energy then being provided by renewables and is still electrifing. What do you mean it's silly?
I've seen a few articles now where a baseline required battery storage is on the order of weeks. What do you mean a few hours is all that's required? What if you have a multi-day cloudy, wind-still weather? What do you do then?????
>size your panels for the seasonal minimum, attach batteries
No. You need to over-provison even for minimum seasonal output, because even in seasonal minimum you still need to charge your batteries. Winter is very long.
> only hours worth of batteries
If you don't mind constant blanks during periods of prolonged reduced wind/solar output...then sure. I don't what 'few hours' means - there's a day-night cycle every single day. Multi-day and highly variable multi-weeks where solar and wind output is minimal or none are relatively common.
Here's what should give you pause and maybe make you reexamine your confidence - nobody is actually building out a solar/wind/battery infrastructure - nobody. We're essentially expanding natural gas use and complementing it with solar/wind (there's a reason why Germany is singing multi-decade contracts to ship Russian natural gas, and why every natural gas company is pushing renewables). Natural gas is not a transitional technology to renewables. It's the end-state for renewables.
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Nuclear opponents: File lawsuits and generally propose BANANA policy Also nuclear opponents: Gee, look how long it takes to build a nuclear plant.
Absolute nonsense. Owners of nuclear plants are far more likely to open suits, and the suits against plants are over quickly and very rarely successful: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1901/ML19010A148.pdf Take SCANA as an example. They apply to the NRC in March 2008, are granted a price increase three days later, and are granted project approval 5 months after that. 4 months after that the construction plan is approved.…
Because the court system is well practiced at identifying and dismissing suits that are brought for no other reason than to delay and obstruct something.
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This study is from 1987. Might it it be slightly outdated? This article from 2009 addresses the lower age estimates from the 1980’s era, saying reactors could last for 80 years or even more. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-pla...
FTA : "We think we can replace almost every component in a nuclear power plant," said Jan van der Lee, director of the Materials Ageing Institute (MAI), a nuclear research facility inaugurated this week in France and run by the state-owned nuclear giant EDF. EDF is state owned just as much as nuclear reactor construction company => I wouldn't trust that guy
Do we stress about the risks nuclear power far out of proportion to how safe it is? Yes. Even accounting for the worst accidents, it kills a very low number of people per TWh. Do we ignore the risks of fossil fuels far out of proportion to how dangerous they are? Also yes. They kill an absurdly high number of people per TWh; by most estimates coal is several hundred times more dangerous than nuclear. Does that mean n…
Well well. My girlfriends oldest brother died in what was a wave of cancer infant deaths that strangely coincides with the fallout of Chernobyl's radioactive cloud. Her other brother came to the world deformed, which again happened to more mothers than hers. In my school class (~30 kids) alone there were 4 kids who had deformations or other mutations that affected their life's negatively (for those who still live: to…
My understanding is that Chernobyl was caused by an experiment that went wrong due to errors in following processes correctly.
I would assume that most reactors just make electricity, and outside of smaller reactors used for research they aren't used for experiments. Is that correct?
Everything around the nuclear disasters has been a human bullshit of a problem, not a technological one. Probably with the exception of Fukushima, where all the conditions were put into the extreme - killer earthquake and monster tsunami. Being anxious about it is more than justified, especially with idiotic countries in mind. But that doesn't mean we need to abandon it. Nuclear is the future and there is no debate a…
This is a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow from the premise.
BBC on nuclear: asking the questions that don't matter. You know what the real problem with nuclear is? It's not economically competitive. What if I told you: you can invest in a project that will tie up your money for 10+ years and once it's completed will provide energy for 10x the current cost of solar/wind. And while youre building this plant, solar/wind and batteries will keep getting cheaper.. and by the time y…
1. It's slightly less than 2x, not 10x. 2. Countries like the Netherlands that don't have the space for sufficient on-shore wind have to go to off-shore wind, which is actually more expensive than nuclear energy. 3. We'd be making actual progress instead of fighting residents and nature preservation for every plot of land again and again, auctioning land leases for every few megawatts, and it all just taking forever…
Meanwhile, even just running nuclear reactors is barely profitable, to the point that the federal government had to bail energy companies out twice by limiting liability and taking over most of the costs of demolishing old plants.
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Correct. The right questions to ask is not 'But what about Chernobyl' (which is unlikely in most countries) but instead: What about decommissioning costs? Fukushima is a good example of costs from a normal accident we can expect from time to time. Costs are at 200b USD and rising, and they still don't have the reactor site under control. Even normal decommissioning is incredibly expensive and usually covered by gover…
"What about Chernobyl" is usually outright dismissed as being an edge case owing its disaster to the Soviet regime, more concerned over image than safety. The real important question, as you aluded to, is "What about Fukushima" - a disaster occuring in a rich, western nation, Japan; Japan is a nation generally seen as being on the leading edge of technology. If a disaster can occur in Japan, it can feasibly happen an…
I love discussions about nuclear power because they do a really good job showing how the HN demographics are no better at being well reasoned and logically consistent than any other demographic.