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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#451

Post by deaddodo »

reenorap wrote: post #24

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

SoCal Edison was as low as .06usd/kwh when the nuclear plants were operating. As soon as they started shutting them down it shot up to ~.25-30usd/kWh.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#452

Post by gcanyon »

> We still need to overturn national nuclear bans, unlock more funding, and push democratic countries to support clean energy development abroad: especially where it is most needed to compete with Russia’s growing influence.

We also need to figure out how to build reactors in months to years instead of years to decades to failure.

And to build reactors at a cost less than $10 to $20 million per megawatt capacity.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#453

Post by johnebgd »

Retric wrote: post #283
reenorap wrote: post #24

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

> Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate. Compare costs vs coal which isn’t cost competitive these days. Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. Nuclear must have a more complicated boiler setup wi…

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250908384960/en/Dee...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#454

Post by DarkNova6 »

reenorap wrote: post #24

We need to drive down the costs of implementing nuclear energy. Most of it are fake costs due to regulation. I understand that regulation is needed but we also need nuclear energy, we have to find a streamlined way to get more plants up and running as soon as possible. I think they should all be government projects so that private companies can't complain that they're losing money and keep have to ratchet up the pric…

Nuclear energy requires high-end engineering and manufactoring skills. Both vanish in the west more and more, particularly in the US.

China can build nuclear plants just fine because they have the manufactoring and engineering quality and quantity. Where did they get that? We gave it to them and even financed it.

The crisis of the west is a crisis of production. To bury regulations just means to keep a failing system afloat for another short while. Regulations exist to prevent another Chernobyl, thanks.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#455

Post by seabass-labrax »

Llamamoe wrote: post #370
javcasas wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. And then you have bad faith actors. No one would ever put graphite tips in the control rods to save some money, wouldn't they? No one would station troops during war in a nuclear power plant, wouldn't they? No one would use a nuclear power plant to breed material for nuclear bombs, wouldn't they? Finally,…

> The problem with nuclear is not the ultra-low probability of incidents, but the potential size of the incidents. This is also not as bad as people think. Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible. Even if we had ten times as many nuclear disasters - hell, even fifty times more - it would still be a cleaner source of…

> Chernobyl was bad, but the real effect on human health was shockingly small. Fukushima is almost as well-known, and its impact was negligible.

Was this not due to the expensive clean-up effort in each case respectively? Nuclear reactors may be a lot cleaner than fossil fuels operationally, and reducing their regulation to allow them to replace fossil fuels may well be cleaner on average. But if the once-in-a-blue-moon incident requires huge amounts of money in clean-up costs, then maybe those health and safety regulations would prove themselves cheaper in the long term.

Perhaps the real question is why we do not demand such stringent health and safety standards on fossil fuels, which are operationally dirty and prone to disaster.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#456

Post by zenmac »

well would being good if they specifically say thorium nuclear energy is clean energy!

Seems like the Chinese are picking up where US left off:

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/thorium-molten-salt-r...

Maybe the EU can pick that up too.

In context of that really makes one think if Nazis was on to something other than toothpaste?

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/thorium-toothpaste-als...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#457

Post by DennisP »

virtue3 wrote: post #445
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy n…

The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries. So yeah. Regulation. Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident…

And then there's coal. The difference between nuclear and coal is that when nuclear has a horrible accident, it kills fewer people than coal kills as part of its normal expected operation.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#458

Post by DennisP »

phs318u wrote: post #337
theptip wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is. Nuclear is 100-1000x safer than coal. By insisting on such an aggressive safety target, we force prices up and actually incur much higher levels of mortality - just delivered in the boring old ways of pollution and climate-driven harms. See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for detailed stats. I think we should target “risk parity with Gas” until climate change is under control.

When the nuclear industry feels confident enough to not need its own special law to protect it from liability in case of accidents, I’ll feel a little more confident in their safety rhetoric. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

The trouble with liability is that if your nuclear plant has an accident and the cancer rate in the area doesn't detectably change, everybody in the area who gets cancer will sue you anyway.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#459

Post by strawhatguy »

kieranmaine wrote: post #435
strawhatguy wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60). That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".

The report mentions this: > Las Vegas can reach 97% of the way to 1 GW constant supply. My take away from the report is not that 24/365 is achieveable everywhere, but how solar + batteries is rapidly dropping in price and is now cheaper with other forms of generation, which will result in solar + batteries making up the majority of generation on the grid. > In a sunny city like Las Vegas, the estimated Levelised Cost…

I guess, but this article seems misleading to me then. The percentages do seem to mean to constant 1GW supply, not a total supply.

So what’s the total supply?

LV is ~9 Gwh per day (3.3Twh year according to internets), so 23ish Gwh does seem promising, but they don’t have near that much solar I don’t think.

I guess Im more skeptical, especially when this is coming from a single purpose advocacy group. They just shut down that solar thermal electric plant after all. While that’s different than photovoltaics I know, it’s also true no grand plan survives implementation.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#460

Post by frotaur »

virtue3 wrote: post #445
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear inherently need a lot more effort refining fuel as you can’t just dig a shovel full of ore and burn it. Even after refining you can’t just dump fuel in, you need fuel assemblies. It's true that a pound of nuclear fuel costs more than a pound of coal. But it also has a million times more energy content, which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal. And that's for legacy n…

The problem with nuclear mistakes is they aren't a few decades. They can be measured in centuries. So yeah. Regulation. Don't build a damn LWR on a fault line (Fukushima) 3mile Island - don't have so many damn errors printing out that everything is ignore Chernobyl - we all know I think. It's still being worked on to contain it fully. Goiânia accident (brazil) - caesium-137 - Time magazine has identified the accident…

I agree Chernobyl was an epic disaster, but Fukushima ? Last I heard the radiation level are basically normal even close to the reactor, and overall radiation wide there hasn't been much damage if at all.

So it seems that fukushima is an example of something that should have been an EPIC accident, but actually was perfectly fine in the end. I may be wrong, but thats what I remembered from the wikipedia page.

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