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Nuclear energy is clean

collectifission.nl

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Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#531

Post by nl »

blitzar wrote: post #421
nl wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very many places. Germany: 41% of all power was from renewables in 2021 https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene... UK: 43.1% of all power was from renewables in 2020 https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/how-mu... Australia: 32.5% (2021): https://apo.org.au/node/317318 US: 22% expected in 2022: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php

> UK: 43.1% of all power was from renewables in 2020 Yet my UK electricity cost is tracking the price of gas - up ~3x.

Yeah sorry about that war or something?

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#532

Post by cycomanic »

tomp wrote: post #420
cycomanic wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument has been debunked many times. A large enough grid can be based on wind and solar alone, this has been shown for the US in several studies. Storage however is advantageous because it enables to reduce the amount of overcapacity. The good thing is that the way the electricity market works, is that it provides direct economic incentives to develop storage or basing high electricity demand production indust…

Can you share some of these studies? I just don’t understand how you can power a grid at night with just wind and solar (no batteries). Even the US isn’t large enough that sun would always be shining somewhere.

Here is one from 2015 [1] (I recall some older and more recent ones, but can't find them right now). IIRC they rely on a number of strategies (not necessarily all in the same story) : 1. A much better interconnected frid 2. Overcapacity in both wind and solar, but particularly wind. 3. Operate e.g. heatpumps during times with lots of energy available to heat or cool coolant. 4. Adjust energy intensive industries to primarily work during times of oversupply.

[1] https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2015/EE/C5EE0...

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#533

Post by cycomanic »

jokoon wrote: post #351
cycomanic wrote: post #289

This article perfectly exemplifies the arguments in discussions. Lets just concentrate on the waste discussion. The article says heavy metals in solar panels are a problem (I kind of agree, although the way it is described makes it out like we are talking about huge amounts, in reality the lead in solar panels is largely from soldering so very small amounts. Orders of magnitude more are being used for other applicati…

Renewables are not baseload. If you add batteries to the mix, nuclear is better. Not to mention the quantity of power produced. Nuclear is expensive because it's long term investment. Renewables also cost more in resources (concrete, steel, copper), there are sourced charts about this. Renewables are better than coal and gaz, but not better than nuclear. There's nothing wrong with renewables, but it's not enough to o…

Yes renewables are baseload. People look up what it actually means, before you repeat this stuff. Quoting directly from the Wikipedia article:

> The base load[1] (also baseload) is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time, for example, one week. This demand can be met by unvarying power plants,[2] dispatchable generation,[3] or by a collection of smaller intermittent energy sources,[4] depending on which approach has the best mix of cost, availability and reliability in any particular market.

Wind and solar are intermittent sources.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#534

Post by vfclists »

No one ever head of the Integral Fast Reactor which uses the "nuclear waste" as fuel?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp1Xja6HlIU

Somehow it never comes up in nuclear power discussions.

The only problem with nuclear is there are no future sales from it. Capitalism works on having something to sell in the future.

Once nuclear is reliable and safe there is no more money to be made from it and this is why all the Greens are no more than fronts for the fossil fuel industry.

They are hellbent on pushing inadequate alternatives which make carbon based fuels the only reliable ones.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#535

Post by ncmncm »

belorn wrote: post #509
ncmncm wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously , until you have enough renewable generating capacity to charge your storage, you are not selling stored energy: you sold what you generated. It is extremely disingenuous, not to say dishonest, to make up scenarios based on status quo when there is still very little renewable generation capacity.

I find equally disingenuous and dishonest to talk about pumped storage for renewables when they do not exist as a viable economical model. If you want to blame the lack of renewable generation capacity then feel free to do so. Pumped storage could in theory, in the future, when the time is right, be cost effective. We don't know. We are not there yet. Its a financial model to be to be tested when and if we get there.…

What is this "financial model" you imagine?

Utilities will need storage, and will build whatever is cheapest. In some places that will be pumped hydro. End of story.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#536

Post by cycomanic »

kubami wrote: post #382
arinlen wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes it's 300 years, because of magic which somehow makes recycling feasible and let's us ignore all the parts which have lifetimes longer than 300 years. That's not a valid argument. So far nobody has managed to come up with a economically and ecologically feasible way to recycle nuclear waste. The French Le Havre site is primarily run for military reasons and multiples the amount of waste. Admittedly lower grade waste, but it still needs to be kept away from people for thousands of years.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#538

Post by ncmncm »

shakow wrote: post #489
ncmncm wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desperate, much?

Am I living in an alternate universe? US, UK, Russia, France have been putting nuke plants in submarines for half a century, most of these countries have done the same with surface ships, be it carriers or ice-breakers, Russia has built nuke plants on barges to provide power for remote areas; heck, the US even ran a nuke plant on a plane, and I am the one being desperate?

Yes. Yes, you are.

In none of those cases have economic considerations been dispositive, or even of much interest.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#539

Post by cycomanic »

JetSetWilly wrote: post #429
ben_w wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is not unusual for eg. the entirety of North-western Europe to have a calm spell of little to no wind OK, but the EU grid is bigger than that, so the question should be "how common are weather patterns that combine low wind with low sun over the entire continent rather than just a quarter of it?" > Batteries and storage just aren't going to scale up to do that (or even 1% of it) in this century. If cars are elec…

Well, pretty common, as weather systems are typically continental in scale. Even if you built enough wind turbines to satisfy 10000% of EU demand within the EU (which is what you would need to have a shot at this kind of redundancy) the amount of huge HVDC interconnects you would need criss-crossing the continent make it completely impractical.

Are you just making up numbers? Have you ever done any sailing? I can tell you that weather patterns on with no wind for extended periods of time even over the size of a country are not really happening. People have done studies and the amount of overprovisioning is typically on the order of 5x IIRC without storage. Moreover you need at least 2x overcapacity for nuclear as well.

Re: Nuclear energy is clean

#540

Post by blitzar »

nl wrote: post #531
blitzar wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> UK: 43.1% of all power was from renewables in 2020 Yet my UK electricity cost is tracking the price of gas - up ~3x.

Yeah sorry about that war or something?

Did we sanction the sun and wind that come from russia or something?
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