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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

#481

Post by Reason077 »

naasking wrote: post #470
Reason077 wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate." Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast q…

> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.

The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:

~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.

~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100

~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100

~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.

It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".

Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#482

Post by zer00eyz »

ezst wrote: post #403
jay_kyburz wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same corporate structures that hid data about smoking, PFAS and oxycodone are the ones you want running a nuclear plant? Thanks for expressing my concerns over nuclear so clearly. It's not the technology I fear, its the people in charge. Combined with democracy, it means that even if we trusted our governments today to police nuclear companies, they are replaced every few years. Nobody knows who will be in char…

You should fix your model of governance, because by that measure, any hope for progress is futile. The simple fact that we were better a few decades ago should be comforting. Enough of the shirt term profiteering sociopaths running the show, we can certainly cautiously swing back towards more technocracy and careful strategic planning.

> You should fix your model of governance,

What model of governance, of language, of human culture is going to last longer than the elephants foot will be dangerous to human beings?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#483

Post by Bost »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #333

Glad that the Russian funded Greens were finally defeated. In the end, the green party may have doomed us with this 50 year delay.

I think the Russians probably realized, "We don't even need to fund them - they will glue themselves to the roads for free."

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#484

Post by mqus »

godelski wrote: post #404
quotemstr wrote: post #324

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. You have to take scale into account. This is 20 years of spent fuel. https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/cca0b8d/21474836... That's it. 20 years. Just that, for a constant, quiet output of just about a gigawatt. And that's an old, decommissioned reactor. You're right about nuclear fuel refinement,…

If anyone is interested, here's a picture of decades worth of it[0]. I used to have a video of Russia's, but it seems to have gone down. If somehow you can way back it, here's the link[1]. For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year, which delivers 70% of the country's electricity. If you removed all nuclear power reactors you'd still be generating 0.8kg of radioactive waste[2]. It'll…

> For more comparison, France produces about 2kg of radioactive waste per year,

... per capita. Sure, all other waste is bigger than that, but it is still a whole lot and still, usually, power companies do not have to pay for it, the country does. I wonder why.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#485

Post by tomhow »

yellowapple wrote: post #14

[flagged]

You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#487

Post by phire »

gpm wrote: post #307
mikepavone wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload orient…

> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation…

If the goal is 100% carbon-free energy, then we simply can't let economics get in the way. Otherwise we will always be stuck building some natural gas peaker plants.

And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.

Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.

It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.

The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.

I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#488

Post by fy20 »

jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

One thing to bear in mind about Europe is that to go carbon neutral you need to be able to deal with winters.

First of all they are darker than the US due to latitude, so solar during winter is basically a no go in half of the places where people actually live. I have rooftop solar and November - February it might as well not exist. One January it generated 20kWh for the whole month vs a peak of 70kWh per day in the summer. Wind is an option, but NIMBYism makes that hard as Europe doesn't have as much empty space as the US.

The other thing is heating: in Europe around 64% of residential energy use goes to space heating Vs 42% in the US. And the majority of that comes from gas. So to go carbon neutral, you actually need to greatly increase electricity demand. This is why Europe is pushing for new homes to be really well insulated.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#489

Post by hibikir »

yongjik wrote: post #164
jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

As a supporter of nuclear, I think most nuclear supporters will be happy if we achieve carbon neutrality by any means. But as other commenters pointed out, renewables are not achieving that in most places. According to Google, a staunchly anti-nuclear Germany has 6.95 tons per capita at 2023. France achieved that at 1986 (!!) and is now at 4.14. It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewa…

Because fast to deploy in theory fights quickly with permitting systems and NIMBYism. You need more permits, because a typical solar or wind farm doesn't come close to a nuclear plan's output, so the per-project bureaucracy multiplies. By needing more places, you also have more groups opposing projects for typical NIMBY reasons. You need battery facilities too, and more updates to the grid to deal with having less inertia, and the updates cost money, and the battery facilities themselves face more NIMBYism: Minimum distances to places where people live and such. So when you put it all together, slow bureaucracies just move at glacial paces, and the equipment you would have bought when you sent out the permit is already different than what you want to use when the permitting is approved.

Then we have the tariffs, as Europe puts tariffs on Chinese equipment that change the price quite a bit.

A country that took this very seriously and decided to put renewables as a top priority could go quite fast. But if there's anything one should learn about the last few decades is that modern democracies care too much about vested interest and NIMBY complaints to actually get projects like this done. Just look at charts showing power waiting to go online in most countries: You'll find very long lines, even after dealing with the rest of the the bureaucratic gauntlet.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#490

Post by kulahan »

raverbashing wrote: post #121
RandomLensman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help. Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).

I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands

I was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant.
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