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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

#501

Post by lstodd »

gioele wrote: post #363
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…

We need to drive down the cost of dealing with nuclear waste. Possibly to zero, because that is a cost that will have to be paid basically forever. Between 1961 and 2023 «5,600 TWh of electricity were generated from nuclear energy in Germany». [1] Every year Germany spends (and will have to spend until the end of time) at least 2 billion Euros just to keep the existing nuclear waste safe [2] (more than half of the ye…

This is bullshit.

Radioactivity is exponential. If something is very active at start, it will fade quickly. If it is not, it is not dangerous to begin with.

So whatever they do spend, they need to optimize instead of hiding from cost-cutting behind this.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#502

Post by Retric »

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…

> 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.

Nuclear is inherently vastly more complicated requiring more maintenance, manpower, etc per KW of capacity and thus has more operational costs. A 50+ year lifespan means keeping 50+ year old designs in operation which plays a significant role in costs here.

> 5 miles of highway has around the same amount of concrete in it as a nuclear power plant.

A cooling tower isn’t dealing with any radioactivity and it’s not a safety critical system yet it’s still difficult to build and thus way more expensive per cubic foot of concrete than a typical surface road. When road projects get complicated they can quickly get really expensive just look at bridges or tunnels.

> You could hypothetically build a hydroelectric dam that wipes out a city on the first day.

Hydroelectric dams have directly saved more lives than they have cost due to flood control. The electricity bit isn’t even needed in many cases as people build dams because they are inherently useful. Society is willing to carry those risks in large part because they get a direct benefit.

Wind turbines are closer and do sometimes fail early, but they just don’t cost nearly as much so the public doesn’t need to subsidize insurance here.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#503

Post by mtoner23 »

hvb2 wrote: post #236
StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that renewable tends to be intermittent and long-term storage is an open problem. You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. It means you either need an alternative when production is too low such as coal or gas-fired power plants or a lot of capacity sufficiently stretched out than they are not stopped at the same time. Managing such a large…

> You can do find in a day with battery but you can’t really produce a lot in the summer and use in winter. Batteries aren't the only storage. The better options in my opinion are the places where you can use the landscape to your advantage. Pump a lake full when there's too much power and let it drain when there's too little. Also in a connected grid setup, the sun always shines somewhere though that does come with…

all the easy pumped storage options have already been tapped. would require mega projects to create more. something only china can do these days :(

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#504

Post by epistasis »

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?

It would actually cost a lot less to use renewables and storage than a bunch of nuclear.

For a completely decarbinized grid, there are two paths: 1) 100% renewables plus storage, or 2) ~90% renewable plus storage, and 10% nuclear/advanced geothermal.

There's lots of debate about which one would be cheapest. But the true answer depends on how the cost curve of technologies develops over the coming 20 years. (Personally, I think 100% renewables will win because projections of all experts severely overestimate storage and renewables costs, while simultaneously severely underestimating the costs of nuclear. Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers. So I think that trend will continue...)

You won't hear much about this in the popular media though, because they are too afraid of offending conservatives with politically incorrect facts. Sites like Ars Technica cover it though:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22092022/inside-clean-ene...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#505

Post by Retric »

Izikiel43 wrote: post #382
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,…

Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1162/

Would have been even funnier if they included sunlight, that’s 100% E=MC^2 baby.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#506

Post by bluefirebrand »

fy20 wrote: post #488
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…

I don't think you should dismiss opposition to wind as mere NIMBYism

Windmills can be super loud and disruptive if they are built near you

Take a look around online and you can find people posting videos along the lines of "A windmill was built near my house, now every evening it's like a strobe light in here as the sun sets behind the windmill"

I wouldn't want to live anywhere near one myself

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#507

Post by bluefirebrand »

pfdietz wrote: post #239
pil0u wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we wan…

Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable

Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#508

Post by phire »

gpm wrote: post #494
phire wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Nuclear power has a massive handicap that most R&D was abandoned back in the 80s because it was uneconomic. And another handicap that the R&D it did get was never that focused on economics, commercial nuclear power were always a side effect of the true goal (Small reactors for nuclear submarines and Breeder reactors for nuclear weapons). And to get the promised low costs, you really need to commit and take advantage of massive economics of scale.

I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.

What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.

And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#509

Post by casey2 »

aussiegreenie wrote: post #412

Nuclear power is clean but VERY EXPENSIVE. Dispatble solar and wind are about 1/5 the price of new nuclear.

Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition.

In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#510

Post by pfdietz »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #507
pfdietz wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with that, renewables are cheaper. One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.

Who the actually cares about cheaper I want better and more reliable Can we please stop optimizing everything into low quality low reliability garbage for the sake of being cheaper ?

Renewables and storage would be cheaper at the same level of reliability.
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