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Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

reuters.com

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Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#491

Post by ComradePhil »

bigbugbag wrote: post #457
cm2187 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables with “magic” storage. Wind can be low for a month for a whole country (cf UK last year). There is no storage technology that can store that much power at scale. What you need is an alternative on demand source of energy, which cost is always omitted when looking at renewable energy cost.

Actually, no. The only climate compatible way is not an alternative on demande source of energy, but the other way around: adapt our energy consumption to its availability and significantly lower our energy use. (see this 2009 piece by low tech magazine[1]) This is the real issue with dealing with climate change: we have to drastically change our way of living, in ways that most of us have not properly grasped and ar…

Not possible to build a civilization with hunter gatherer ways of harvesting power. "The sun didn't shine and wind speed was too low, so the ventilators stopped and people died".

We need energy equivalent of grains: renewable and storable.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#492

Post by ComradePhil »

pfdietz wrote: post #484
jahewson wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of pumped hydro, storage is very expensive. Would need something like a 15x reduction in storage costs to be competitive with nuclear.

That's nonsense. https://model.energy/

Would the people who built this cross a river which used to have an average depth of 5 feet in 2011 with a medival knight suit on?

If yes, they should do that. If no, they should take the website down and stop misleading people.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#493

Post by natmaka »

Aachen wrote: post #149
legulere wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have 7 of these and you find a flaw in its design you have to take down the power for the entire country. Something similar happened in France recently: https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/saf...

If only we could have both types of energy source. Cover the gaps in solar/wind with nuclear, cover the gaps in nuclear with solar/wind. Sprinkle a small amount of pumped hydro and battery storage on top and what a world it could be.

With such a (realistic) approach nuclear is condemned because its production costs (LCOE: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 ) are higher than renewables' (and the gap is enlarging). Therefore renewables will be preferably used. Nuclear gets more expensive as it is more sparsely used: this feedback loop will widen the gap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udJJ7n_Ryjg

With time renewables production will get less an less intermittent thanks to a more and more adequate spreading, to a mix (wind, solar...), to storage (hydrogen...) and an overly-expensive nuclear will become useless.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#494

Post by natmaka »

Aachen wrote: post #257
est31 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear can't be shut down / turned on on a short term basis, there is a lot of inertia. It might be a solution for seasonal issues only, but in Germany, there's usually wind during the no-sun season, and sun during the no-wind season.

Sun can be predicted. Not sure what the reaction time is and how far ahead we can reliably forecast wind, but even if there is zero response possible to wind fluctuations that still seems like a win. Afaik fuel is also not the biggest cost in nuclear so estimating on the high side might not be an issue (but this is admittedly where I veer into speculation).

Uranium (as a nuclear fuel) cost may never become prohibitive, however ore grade may prove a major challenge as its decline leads to more emissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660554

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#495

Post by ComradePhil »

burmanm wrote: post #9
dry_soup wrote: post #7

Electricity prices are through the roof in Finland right now. This was even the case before the war started. We import an incredible amount of LNG from Russia, a lot of which is used for electricity production if I have it correct, which we would of course like to be independent of. But for the time being we have spikes of 60-70 cents/kWh electricity prices. Hopefully OL3 will help this somewhat. Finland has another…

We don't import a lot of LNG from Russia. Gas coming from Russia comes through the pipes, not LNG. However, we don't even use gas a lot in Finland (it accounts 3% of the total energy production). The electricity prices are through the roof for other reasons (and have been for almost a year now) and are not related to Russia at all.

> and have been for almost a year now

Correct!

> are not related to Russia at all.

Wrong!

The price increase has EVERYTHING to do with Russia... because the conflict has been ongoing for much longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30522164

Those trading energy knew of the energy related tensions between Russia and the west and hence were bidding high prices for these commidities in the futures markets.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#496

Post by natmaka »

liketochill wrote: post #328
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Without including storage and overbuilding of solar and wind to provide the same capacity factor as nuclear it is not a fair comparison, so it doesn’t point out how uneconomical this nuclear project is. The attractiveness of 1.6 GW of nuclear power is that it is carbon free, statistically the safest, it is firm energy that can be depended upon 24x7x365, and fuel costs are so trivial nobody even brings them up. All of…

Nuclear isn't (historically) "statistically the safest", and any major accident or hot-waste-related problem may worsen its case.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#497

Post by natmaka »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #352
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Olkiluoto 3 was the first-ever EPR to start construction back in 2005. It was supposed to go live in 2009, but basically everything that could have gone wrong did, which is why it was so massively delayed. Funnily enough, the 2nd and 3rd EPRs in China both opened before this one, taking "only" 9 years from start to production. They're also the world's largest reactors now.

Those reactors in China (at the Taishan powerplant) were completed at a (officially) 60% overcosts, and were 5 years late.

One of them is shut down since mid-2021 after an incident (leak).

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#498

Post by pfdietz »

ComradePhil wrote: post #492
pfdietz wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense. https://model.energy/

Would the people who built this cross a river which used to have an average depth of 5 feet in 2011 with a medival knight suit on? If yes, they should do that. If no, they should take the website down and stop misleading people.

The argument you are trying to make there completely fails to defend the claim that storage need to be 15x cheaper for renewables to compete with nuclear.

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#499

Post by natmaka »

ilyich wrote: post #353
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Area. To produce 1 gigawatt of power you need 1000 square kilometers of wind turbines or 300 sq km of solar elements or 3 sq km of nuclear power plants. How much land do you have in your country that you are ready to deforestate in order to build renewables? Predictability. Renewables depend on weather. They only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. Are you ready to be able to heat your house only when the wea…

Area: offshore wind is by far the most promising renewable (excellent aggregated power and load factor).

Predictability: spreading out production units, using a mix (wind, solar...) and storage are key. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

Re: Finland starts much-delayed nuclear plant, brings respite to power market

#500

Post by natmaka »

Gatsky wrote: post #362
bluejekyll wrote: post #321

What's surprising is the length of time of this project. It was started in 2000, and just completed. That's 23 years of development. These nuclear projects appear to take a significant amount of time. By comparison, this wind turbine project near my parents was approved in 2016 and completed in 2018, providing 78 megawatts of power. Yes that's significantly less than the 1.6 gigawatts of this Finnish power plant. But…

Renewables are fair-weather energy sources, both literally and geopolitically. Hopefully it never comes to that, but off-shore wind is a trivially easy target in a war. Solar too is not very defendable. Power plants are a bit better (in a sub-apocalypse war at least).

Renewables are more sparsely deployed (no real way to take them all in a quick sweep), and don't create risk whenever exposed to battles/missiles/...

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/11/1085427380/ukraine-nuclear-po...

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