Activists who embrace nuclear power • Hacker News Board

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#481

Post by epistasis » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 4:24 PM UTC

thewarrior wrote: post #320

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

Completely disagree with this assessment. Storage is the key problem. There are no easy solutions and you need scalable capacity that can quickly spin up in the mean time. Otherwise you’ll have to build some sort of crazy world wide energy internet that won’t be finished in time to beat climate change.

I agree that storage is the key challenge. But it's a lot easier for us to build storage than it is to build new nuclear. In the time it takes to build new nuclear, we can build two consecutive generations of battery factories. We do this all the time, lots of different companies are building battery factories, and they never get delayed or abandoned due to inability to build.

Nuclear, even if we were happy to throw all the money we have at it, is not a climate solution because it can not be deployed quickly enough. In addition to its economic costs in terms of labor and materials, it has huge time costs, and it's now too late to try to build something that may or may not be able to scale. We have zero examples in the West of being able to build nuclear in a scaleable manner within the past 30 years. It's all failure after failure. And the only reason that any utility has tried again is 1) regulatory capture to put all the economic risk on ratepayers, and 2) intensive lobbying of utility executives to make the bad economic decision to try nuclear once again.

SMRs are literally the only hope for nuclear in the US, and even their best predictions don't look that great.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#482

Post by epistasis » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

inter_netuser wrote: post #475

epistasis wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone's forgetting capacity factor-- 10 to 30%. Which puts solar and nuclear on completely the same scale... If you don't think mass is a good way to compare, and you're concerned about resources, please suggest the metric that will somehow make nuclear look good. Because that concrete is not very recyclable. So the 95% recyclability of solar panels is making them look a looooot better than nuclear once we move b…

how does it put them on the same scale? nukes are online 80%+ of the time.

I think the capacity factor of nuclear is much closer to 95% or higher these days, but call it 100% for simplicity

PV capacity factor is typically 16%-28% [1], which adjusting the W/kg, gives us:

Solar PV: 0.8W/kg - 2.8W/kg, capacity factor adjusted (with supporting infrastructure weighing 2x the panels, a total spitball)

Nuclear: 0.8W/kg - 4.5W/kg, capacity factor adjusted, two different modern reactor designs, concrete only.

With this ratio, higher numbers mean better power densities, and the ranges completely overlap between nuclear and solar PV. Nuclear isn't achieving orders of magnitude better power density over solar.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by vlovich123 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #272

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that, even taking second-order effects into account, the total number of deaths from nuclear accidents is actually quite low compared to other methods of generating electricity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM Nuclear seems more dangerous for the same reason planes seem more dangerous than cars—when something goes wrong, it's a big news event.

One of the other comments was talking about the land-use impact of renewables. Nuclear exclusion zones are pretty bad from this perspective.

Aside from Chernobyl (which happened some 35 years ago), nuclear exclusion zones are pretty small & don't have a significant impact (Deepwater Horizon well was arguably larger in terms of the area impacted).

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #361

throwaway894345 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ , the US consumes 100 quadrillion BTU or 30 million GWH each year, and according to https://www.seia.org/initiatives/siting-permitting-land-use-... , 1GW requires 5000-10000 acres. If I'm mathing properly, that's about 25M acres or the state of Tennessee. Of course, we already have something like 11% of our energy supply met by renewables, so maybe we…

That is primary energy use. PV produces electrical energy, not primary thermal energy. Each joule of electrical energy may displace several joules of thermal energy.

I don't think it matters (or perhaps I'm not following)? We need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, not only the electrified segment. That presumably means electrifying all of it and powering it with clean energy. Since we're talking about 100% solar in this thread, we'd need a lot of land to do the job.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by jlevers » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

macspoofing wrote: post #464

stopping wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How about reduce that to 0 for night-time? No, GP is averaging out across the whole day. If you get 100W during daylight and 0W during night, you can average to 50W for an entire 24-hour period. GP took 30W as a conservative estimate, which is entirely reasonable.

Thanks for clarification. But don't you find it misleading to amortize panel power generation across day and night? It makes it seem like you just need more panels to cover power demand in the evening and night .. when in reality, no amount of panels will ever work.

I think that if you consider storage, then you can in fact amortize panel power generation across day and night, because you need more panels during the day to create the extra power that will be used at night (when none of the panels are actively generating power).

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#486

Post by belorn » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:21 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #474

belorn wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason that we see this much articles being posted on hacker news is that we are still using fossil fuels and there is no active plans to stop it. Everyone* agree that climate change is happening. Everyone agree that burning fossil fuel for power is bad. And then there is a void for what to do next. Can we all agree that we should stop subsidize existing fossil fuel infrastructure? No more paying oil power plants…

>Can we all agree that we should stop subsidize existing fossil fuel infrastructure? Yes, but that's not what this article is about. >Can we also all agree to stop expanding capacity for more fossil fuels? Yes, but that's not what this article is about. >Can we then also agree to stop repairing and extending the lifetime of existing power plants that uses fossil fuels? Yes, but that's not what this article is about.…

This conversation match pretty well the phrase "Talking past each other". Environmental activists that are also in favor of nuclear power are not interested in nuclear power for nuclear power itself. The goal is to get rid of fossil fuels, with the strategy to do so simply left open for both storage and nuclear.

Since we are in an agreement on the questions about fossil fuels then everything else are unimportant. Lets implement those things we agree on! Where I live, the government and the green party which decides on the current energy strategy has the opposite strategy. Their strategy for handing grid stability is to subsidize oil power plants and to expand the capacity to buy coal energy from nearby countries. No intention at all to allow existing power plants that uses fossil fuels to shut down. The stated goal of emission free energy grid is reached the moment where the total export of renewables over a year is higher than the import of coal.

I don't need to wonder who is desperately campaigning to get tax money. The government budget for energy subsidizing is public information. It is listed under the term of "reserve energy".

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by jlevers » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #297

macspoofing wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. Honestly ... it isn't just about cost. Nuclear is expensive but it isn't prohibitively expensive. The big picture is we know that nuclear can power an economy, it does not emit global warming gasses, and also places a tiny footprint on the surrounding ecosystem. Solar and win…

It’s disingenuous to factor in mining requirement for solar panels but not uranium. Sure the supply chain to support the infrastructure required for 10 billion people is a lot on the environment, and we certainly could do a lot better. But these include better recycling of existing minerals (this includes solar panels), better forest management, better land use for food production, more careful road design that doesn…

Uranium can be extracted from seawater, and my understanding is that there's enough uranium in the oceans to last 10s (maybe 100s?) of thousands of years at current energy consumption levels. It's also renewable, albeit on a very long timescale -- but the timescales of consumption and renewal for uranium in seawater are much closer in length than the consumption/renewal timescales for fossil fuels.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by liminvorous » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

nl wrote: post #439

screye wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem. The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets…

> Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. This is a ( very ) common misconception. A MIT study found that safety and regulatory increases contributes less than 1/3 of the cost increase in nuclear plants since 1975 (after adjusting for inflation): Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering…

> Figuring out what's causing those changes involved diving into detailed accounting records on the construction of these nuclear plants; data on that was available for plants built after 1976.

My understanding was that the cost of nuclear started skyrocketing around the mid-late 70s, so around the period this study period begins to get data.

And I thought the nature of the cost increases was things like being stuck iterating on designs optized for being part of a weapons program rather than safety or economics, and making it difficult enough to get approval that only companies of the "win the contract, then hold the sunk costs to random for more money" sort would bother trying to build them.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by jessaustin » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

mannerheim wrote: post #217

jessaustin wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that link, we learn that the industry is prohibited from killing 4200 a year, which number would have a negligible effect on the population and of which number the industry has only ever killed a tiny fraction. Far more eagles die from automobile impact than from wind generation. Eagles are flying coyotes. So long as we aren't actively poisoning them, we can coexist just fine.

There are fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs of golden eagle in the U.S. But perhaps killing 20% of the population annually would have a negligible effect.

This is silly. Your own link, above, has wind generation deaths for both golden and the vastly more common bald eagles as a small portion of the 500/yr figure that also includes more common causes such as automobile strikes. You're not really worried about this fanciful issue.

You would have more fun if you trolled using one of your established HN accounts instead of a greenbean.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by arrosenberg » Mon, Feb 22, 2021, 5:41 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #454

arrosenberg wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have looked into it and I don't find that at all. I agree that solar and wind are more profitable in the short term, and they fit the private-equity model of funding much better than Nuclear. That has nothing to do with engineering and technology, nor about what the actual best long-term solution for securing our energy needs is. Even if Wind/Solar-only was viable (it's not), available everywhere (it's not), and su…

Many crops benefit from partial shade, as do industrial-building roofs, and parking lots. So, claiming that land used for solar can't be used for anything else, and must be new development displacing ecosystems, is not honest. There are numerous viable storage alternatives; the only open question is which will turn out to be cheapest. Underground compressed air is interesting because it can use otherwise-mothballed t…

> Many crops benefit from partial shade, as do industrial-building roofs, and parking lots. So, claiming that land used for solar can't be used for anything else, and must be new development displacing ecosystems, is not honest.

Rooftop and parking lot solar are not nearly enough to meet our energy needs. 1,400 acres per GW! Are there fully-functional farms that can operate on 1,400 covered acres?

Is there a functional gravity storage system on the market today that can store the output of a 1GW plant (besides existing dams, obviously)? Storing hydrogen is a nightmare, and neither Haber-Bosch, Sabatier, nor electrolysis are free.

It's dishonest to hand-wave away the obvious flaws of a technology. It's useful, and we should use it. It's not a panacea.