511–520 of 709 posts
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That voltage stability is electromagnetically coupled to huge chunks of spinning iron. That's your inertia. It buffers voltage spikes. Solar, and surprisingly enough wind as well, do not contribute to this stability. It's one of the big challenges we need to figure out.
Actually, this is something I'm not clear on: Why can't we just add free-spinning "generators" to the grid to contribute inertia?
We saw another downside of nuclear power in Ukraine: When Russian troops attacked towards Enerhodar and there was shelling in the area the safety of the reactor could not be guaranteed. In the end, containment can be guaranteed w.r.t to internal accidents but no facility can ever be safe from outside issues like war, natural disaster or politics. Solar has less single points of failure and if it fails not much happen…
Solar leaks heavy metals into top soil. Most of solar is not recycled properly. Nobody seems to worry about that at all. If a solar facility gets carpet bombed during a war, you think it's more likely it will all just get somewhat cleaned up, and lots of it will be left in-situ and plowed over, or someone will actually remove every little dust particle? I think the lazy way out is what is most likely.
If you have to make shit up to support your argument, why even bother?
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That’s tricky as people have a shocking propensity to build in flood plains either way and dams only mitigate flooding rather than prevent it. I personally doubt that many people are going to change their mind because the location they want to build their home likely floods every 90 years vs every 30. Bill a friend of mine built a large addition on a house which had flooded twice while he had been living there, once…
I think the economic decision making eventually trickles down from banks and insurance companies who actually do the math themselves and charge building-owners/mortgage-owners competitively. It's sort of an continuous invisible hand.
So such trickle down just shifts who builds in such areas but it doesn’t prevent people from living or building in them.
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> Yes, we have to store it somewhere. But all US plants combined make ~5k cubic meters of nuclear waste a year. And all those extra 5k cubic meters per year of nuclear waste needs to be stored for around a million years until they are again safe.
If you read the article you'd see it's not "million years" but ~300.
Dilemma is the protection of future generations of mankind against possible hazards posed by stored nuclear waste products. Are we, humans capable of wielding this king of technology responsibly? Think about terrorism and dirty bombs. Or even more benign reactor disruption due to human error? After al, al humans are fallible.
This remains a hot topic in any political arena's al over de globe. As for unforeseen consequences due to natural disaster, one might consider exposure to nuclear gamma radiation and poisoning. Can mankind handle this responsibility? I think not, see case Chernobyl. A perfect demonstration of human short comings and inability to cope with the aftermath.
Keep in mind that MYRRHA is stil research. It remains to be seen of/when it is commercially viable.
Also keep in mind the alternatives. E.g. a Molten Salt Reactor or MSR, people may hear the term Thorium reactor. Also research.
Side note: As for the nuclear waste from Borssele which is in cased in glass to ensure stable storage and prevent leakage, it cannot be repurposed for reuse.
Just my thoughts.
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This is the problem with nuclear. It was the answer in the 1990s, but renewables have proven themselves. Now sure, if you could snap your fingers and build a new nuclear plant tomorrow, that would be great. But you can't. By the time a plant breaking ground today starts generating power, it will be too late to make sense.
And, if you could, it would still be massively more expensive. For the price you get many times as much renewable generation.
Sadly nobody in charge seems to be bothered. Europe should have been plating the Iberian peninsular in solar for the last 10 years, especially after Crimea. Germany was doing great with solar until about 2015, when it pretty much stopped. From 2009-2014 solar went from 1% of electric consumption to 6%. From 2014-2019 it went from 6% to 8%, not even the same increase let alone continuing on the exponential line.
But while the best time to be building out like your civilisation depended on it was 10 years ago, the second best time is now. Especially with Europe's reliance on Gas from Russia, it should be building everything it can, no moaning about planning permission or people complaining about the scenery etc. Every kWh of solar, or wind, generated is 1kWh of gas not used. More high voltage interconnections should be built to shift power everywhere, especially from Southern Spain, Siciliy and the Penlopenese (where solar should be going), and from Denmark/Netherlands for offshore wind, funded from ECB loans.
Overproduction is not a problem, it can be dumped into green hydrogen generation if nothing else (although again places like Finland are making strides with hot sand storage).
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That's a great comparison of producing, installing, maintaining and recycling, but what about the thing we're building this in the first place? Generating power? Let's say we shut down a coal power plant, which was 30% of a region's energy mix, and want to replace its output. What's the total cost and environmental impact of doing that with solar vs nuclear? This is the only thing that matters. Even if solar panels a…
Hinkley Point C will cost about 100pounds/MWh give or take 10%. Wind power in the UK has strike prices around forty pounds per MWh. That leaves a bit of room for storage before you're more expensive than Hinkley Point C.
With prices climbing there is a lot of room for things to compete.
Similar inside europe (https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/energy-prices).
I think a lot of household would accept a contract for 40 pounds per MWh for the whole year regardless of weather with guarantied capacity, and under liability in the case the contract is not fulfilled.
The United Kingdom is an interesting example of a country which is very interested in having nuclear power and which has less and less of it at the moment because of a lack of investment.
As you probably know, the UK is fairly liberal country, which means that it relies heavily on private companies to get things achieved. Nuclear power, as opposed to coal and gas, has the particularity of having an economic structure in which you have to pay for almost everything before starting up the plant.
You have a huge share of initial investment, and then the relative share of operating costs is very small. And when you are in a context where you have to pay for just about everything before you start the plant, it's a context in which, in the world of private capital, it's hard to to do. In other words, private companies like not to wait too long to see the ROI.
So when you have to put in a lot of money, build for 8 years, possibly 10, possibly even 12 years, before you start to have a €1 turnover, this is stuff that the private sector doesn't like at all. So in the UK, the fact that the electricity production system was placed in the private domain (as in many other places in Europe, but it has been done even earlier in the UK than in the other places) led to a lack of investment in nuclear plants.
(Exactly the same process happened with the railways in the UK)
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They are correct about this bit, but not the wider conclusion. Months long storage of electricity is uneconomic compared with alternatives. Which is a shame for nuclear, as it would really benefit from it if you could just build enough for the average demand and run then 100% of the time. Instead, flexible demand is much cheaper. So you overbuild the nuclear and modulate the demand for making green hydrogen and ammon…
Not all overbuilding is the same. This link [1] shows that solar energy generation is 6 times higher in the summer than in the winter in Germany. The total electricity consumption varies is about 1.5 times higher in the winter than in the summer [2]. In other words, you need to overbuild nuclear by a factor of 1.5, and solar by a factor of 9. [1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/monthly-gener... [2] htt…
Doesn't this just show that you know it can't compete with solar in equatorial regions or wind in the UK, never mind appropriate combinations of the two across Europe and the rest of the world?
And you didn't even compare price. Solar would only need to be 6x cheaper to still win that rigged comparison and provide masses of cheap energy in the summer.
It's about 4 or 5x cheaper at the moment and predicted to fall further as it gets rolled out globally at massive scale.
And every watt rolled out at the moment can displace coal.
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> First they are practical - unlike all renewables nuclear energy plant provides stable influx of energy to the electric grid, regardless of the weather condition. That was "practical" in the 80s. Today it's a problem. You need to have a flexible grid to profit from the cheapest energy available. Having some expensive energy source clog up the grid so you have to turn off solar or wind is a bad thing. > As long as we…
> That baseload myth is dead these days. Batteries are merely one way to store energy but they’re not the only way. How is it a myth? Weather systems are big. it is not unusual for eg. the entirety of North-western Europe to have a calm spell of little to no wind. You need something to keep the lights on when there's no wind, night time etc. That's your base load right there. > And all of this is already working in p…
Nuclear has the opposite problem of wind/solar in that they need to be run at 100% capacity basically all the time because of their absurd building costs and low operating costs. Building enough nuclear to support that load that then sits idle 95% of the year would be absurdly expensive.
You could of course then use that idle capacity to make say methane [0] which is what we currently use to heat our homes but then why spend 3x [2] the money to make that storage when you can just use wind/solar to do it?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-to-gas
[1]: https://mashable.com/article/polar-vortex-2021-cold-temperat...
[2 in the US]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...