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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

#491

Post by kulahan »

RandomLensman wrote: post #15
bluefirebrand wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries

Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.

Why would fusion reactors magically appear when the entire field of nuclear energy production is, in this scenario, essentially dead??

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#492

Post by kulahan »

croes wrote: post #265
kulahan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.

If demand spikes nuclear power plants aren’t fast enough

They are when the power spikes for the day, in a typically predictable fashion. I’m not sure of anything more available that isn’t really dirty.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#493

Post by MostlyStable »

Kon5ole wrote: post #398
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.

You are making a common mistake, your source does only considers things that have happened, not things that could happen. But we know what could happen, which is why the security standards have to be high for nuclear power.

A Chernobyl level incident every single year would kill fewer people than the annual number of people that die from fossil fuel particulate emissions. We can imagine reasonable numbers of accidents and still be sure that it would be dramatically safer than fossil fuels, even ignoring climate change.

And the land rendered uninhabitable would represent less land lost than is expected to be lost from sea level rise, most of which will be extremely hi-value coastal areas.

There is no way you can run the numbers where nuclear, even with dramatically reduced safety standards, is not preferable to fossil fuels. By making it so expensive with such heavy regulations, all we have done is forced ourselves to use the worse-in-all-possible ways fuel source for most of a century, causing millions of premature deaths and untold billions in environmental damages.

Over-regulation of nuclear is high up on the list of greatest civilizational blunders humanity has ever made.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#494

Post by gpm »

phire wrote: post #487
gpm wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, I'm just arguing that "baseload" should be understood to be a bad thing in my comment above.

If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#495

Post by throwaway89201 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #479
Retric wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is why fuel is only 15-20% of the operating costs compared to >60% for coal Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. Especially when you include interest + storage as nuclear reactors start with multiple years worth of fuel when built and can’t quite hit zero at decommissioning so interest payments…

> Nuclear has much higher operating costs than coal. It’s not 20% of 3 = 60% of 1, but it’s unpleasantly close for anyone looking for cheap nuclear power. But that's the point, isn't it? You have two types of thermal power plant, one of them has a somewhat lower fuel cost so why does that one have a higher operating cost? Something is wrong there and needs to be addressed. > It’s a lot more than that, and far from th…

Both of your posts contain very little self-doubt and curiosity. Many points don't seem convincing, and you're consistently not steelmanning the arguments you are replying to.

> it's a machine which is slightly radioactive because it was in the presence of a radiation source

This isn't how radiation works. Material doesn't get radioactive from being in the presence of a radioactive source. Contamination refers to radioactive emitters being somewhere they don't belong.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#496

Post by gpm »

strawhatguy wrote: post #401
kieranmaine wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really a question that should be directed at renewables: "If renewables are so cheap and fast to deploy, how come 39 years after Chernobyl, Germany still cannot get below France in CO2 emission?" Because renewables and storage have only been produced at the scale and price required to achieve this for the last 5 years. [1] The following article "Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes…

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".

That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants... https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rachel-fakhry/myth-247365-power-pla...

This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much rarer to have an extended period of cloud cover and no wind than an extended period of cloud cover, and an extended period without wind. Compound that with "over the entire electrical grid" and it doesn't happen.

And as a worst case version where the geographical and types-of-power constraints exist... e.g. if you're planning an off grid facility which is too small to justify wind power... backup generators exist.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#497

Post by quotemstr »

mqus wrote: post #484
godelski wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recycled down to ten grams per person per year.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#498

Post by bobmcnamara »

quickthrowman wrote: post #473
bobmcnamara wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I read Onkalo was testing empty casks and had stored zero waste for zero years. Bit of a rush to close the GitHub ticket eh?

True, they haven’t stored any waste yet but the facility is completed. And depending on how you look at it, it could be 100,000 years before you know for sure if it works, so my claim that it’s a ‘solved problem’ is a bit strong. I’ll retract that and say that it’s the most promising idea for nuclear waste disposal, one that that is close to beginning operations.

It does seem like one the best designs we've had. I hope it works well.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#499

Post by _aavaa_ »

lucideer wrote: post #390
marcosdumay wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will take longer Longer than nuclear? Where did you get that idea from? Anyway, about #4, nuclear can't economically work in a grid with renewables without batteries. With renewables, you can always temporarily switch to a more expensive generator when they go out, but anything intermittent that competes with nuclear will bankrupt it.

> economically When we're talking about societal public investment - even investment in the private sector - capital cost is a much more constrained consideration than anything related to abstract market "competitiveness". The latter does not influence the former in real terms (only in argumentative policy terms, which are unfortunately more impactful than they should be). > Longer than nuclear? Where did you get tha…

> time to any arbitrary large generation goal

China is proving this to be objective false. Their total energy production (not nameplate power) for wind/solar/hydro is growing substantially faster than their nuclear output.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#500

Post by noodletheworld »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #422
Retric wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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…

Oh come on.

I consider myself reasonably pro nuclear, but this is just like some developer going:

“Oh yeah, that doesn't seem that hard, I could probably implement that in a weekend”

Fact: hard complicated things are expensive.

There is no “just it’s just some concrete…”.

That is, translated “I do not know what Im talking about”.

Hard things, which require constant, high level, technical maintenance…

Are very expensive.

Theyre expensive to build. Theyre expensive to operate. Theyre expensive to decommission.

Theres no magic wand to fix this.

You can drive down the unit cost sometimes by doing things at scale, but Im not sure that like 100 units, or even say 1000 units can do that meaningfully.

…and how how are we planning on having the 100000s of reactors that you would need for that?

Micro reactors? Im not convinced.

Certainly, right now, the costs are not artificial; if you think they are, I would argue you havent done your due diligence in research.

Heres the point:

Making complicated things cheaper doesnt just magically happen by removing regulations. Thats naive.

You need a concrete plan to either a) massively simplify the technology or b) massively scale the production.

Which one? (a) and (b) both seem totally out of reach to me, without massive state sponsored funding.

…which, apparently no one likes either.

Its this frustrating dilemma where idiots (eg. former Australian government) claim they can somehow magically deliver things (multiple reactors) super cheaply.

…but there is no reality to this promise; its just morons trying to buy regional votes and preserve the status quo with coal.

Real nuclear progress needs realistic plans, not hopes and dreams.

Nuclear power is better; but it is more expensive than many other options, and probably, will continue to be if all we do is hope it somehow becomes easy and cheap by doing basically nothing.

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