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Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

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Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#441

Post by Youden »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #179
Tepix wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Existing nuclear power plants can be very cheap at $30 – $40 / MWh New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it. The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations. Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will ea…

Cool, the price of solar right now is $30-$85 / MWh, and that range is dependent on whether you got storage included in the bill or not. And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production. Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years. Nuclear is economically a…

Is that price for Switzerland? What time of year is that power available?

Here's how much each energy source contributes to Switzerland's grid: https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/strom/produktion

Right now, solar and other renewables produce enough energy to meet about two thirds of our demand. Solar alone produced around 55GWh of the needed 169GWh yesterday.

Look at new year's day though: consumption was 192GWh (14% higher than yesterday) and yet solar only produced 11.4GWh and that was an unusually good day for winter.

You can't talk about the price of solar, even solar with storage, without talking about the climate it's in. Assuming your prices are for summer or a mild climate like California, you need to multiply those by around 6x to get a system that can replace nuclear for a baseline load in Switzerland.

That brings the price to $180-$510/MWh.

FWIW: I live in Switzerland and have solar panels and a battery on my house. I sell the obscene amount of excess solar I generate in summer to the grid which covers much of the cost I incur buying from the grid in winter. That power is generated by nuclear.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#442

Post by Mawr »

bjourne wrote: post #327
subscribed wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar. Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past. Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

Yeah, the efficient coal plants displaced the inefficient nuclear ones. Efficiency all the way!

Climate change? Pollution? Nah, who cares, efficiency!

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#443

Post by idiotsecant »

jokteur wrote: post #32

This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full fro…

Its bizarre that nuclear power is a left/right thing. It's clean, safe, and immediately displaces carbon emissions elsewhere. It doesn't require decades of storage and transmission improvements that may or may not come. It just works. Today.

One day nuclear will no longer be neasessary. Until that day comes it is essential. Anyone who disagrees is confusing wishful that being for physics.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#445

Post by noosphr »

Kon5ole wrote: post #76

Citizens should take note that no nuclear plants are ever built without many billions in state loans and guarantees. It's not a cheap source of electricity, it's a way for someone to get money from taxpayers to subsidize their business.

Just like solar then.

Or are we only happy with state subsidies when China does it?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#446

Post by 4ggr0 »

my summarized thoughts when reading through this comment section and being swiss myself - have y'all ever heard of solar and wind[0]? i know that battery storage is a challenge, but hey, we constantly glaze ourselves as having great universities, lots of wealth, stability, precise engineering etc.

so let's put our strength into battery storage. invest in research towards it. research it ourselves. build out renewable energy. sponsor such things in foreign places we steal, ehrm, i mean, trade resources from.

this whole nuclear debate feels like a defeat. well, we tried, seems too hard, let's got back to ye' olden times.

i am also aware that we use french nuclear power as a backbone constantly and still boast as being so advanced and green, but that's also helping my point.

[0]or fusion, or just a different way to boil water without creating waste we have to bury in a mountain and think about how we want to make sure that nobody every accidentally opens the toxic caves in the next thousands of years.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#447

Post by TheCondor »

chpatrick wrote: post #378
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

I think it's not that hard of a problem in general. There are plenty of abandoned mines with tons of space where you can forget about it forever.

Then surely when they started pushing back on Yucca Mountain opening up, the federal government could have just bought one of the many mines that no longer produces, right? Why hasn't that happened? There are 49 other states that could, in theory, be bidding on a contract to house nuclear waste. There are some states that have a large amount of land relative to their population too.

For the record, this thorium reactor waste isn't harming anyone in Colorado, but they've also refurbished the plant in to a natural gas power station and it's still actively run. Should that be decommissioned, then I'm not entirely sure what it costs to maintain the waste storage facility. They're adding a couple new turbines to this plant so I expect it has a decently long life ahead, but what happens in like a century if DoE doesn't move this waste?

Regardless of the engineering, and I think we've made tremendous advances in nuclear design and have much better safety than before, I think it's more than low-information voters and regulatory issues, fundamentally we don't have a strong answer for the waste. A nuclear powerplant has a relatively fixed production life, but there is no end to the cost life.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#448

Post by Mawr »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #418
awesome_dude wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to be snark - Waste is never safe to store - the containment has to prevent leeching - over a lifespan of thousand, or tens of thousands of years And it only takes one earthquake, or animal digging to completely upend that strategy

What kind of animal is going to dig through concrete and steel and also be hundreds of meters underground in solid rock?

Apparently the hypothetical future humanoids, somehow ignorant of all prior history, who will, ignoring all warning signs, start eating as much of the waste as fast as possible, then ignoring the obvious connection between eating that stuff and getting sick...

I wish I was kidding, but the argument does seem to be "what if 100_000 years from now somebody digs this stuff up and a few people get sick or die".

It's concern trolling at its worst.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#449

Post by UltraSane »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #398
UltraSane wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear" This is like firefighters opposing using water.

The time for nuclear power was 50 years ago. And it's sad due to unfounded fears and coal interests there weren't more built. I would love if historically we had build more nuclear power plants. I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options.

" I am against it now because we have other safer, cheaper, and more sustainable options."

Not if you want 100% reliable power with no CO2 emissions.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#450

Post by aeturnum »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #316
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

From what I understand the waste problem is tremendously overblown. Move it to some storage facility somewhere, that's fine. Just keep it on site, that's fine too. A typical gigawatt reactor produces about 20 tons of waste annually, which sounds like a lot but remember this stuff is quite dense, so it would actually take 4 years to fill up a standard shipping container. The storage units for this stuff is incredibly…

I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).

That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!

The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).

[1] https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2432/ML24320A014.pdf

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