Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

bluewin.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 1001 posts

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#551

Post by remarkEon »

bjourne wrote: post #327
subscribed wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar. Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past. Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

This is a mischaracterization of what happened. The economics got bad because of regulatory pressures, and regulatory pressures increased because of anti-nuclear sentiment, and …

… Anti-nuclear sentiment is directly downstream from organized campaigns by organizations like Greenpeace, yes, but also left-aligned political parties that, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, decided make killing nuclear their entire reason for existing.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#552

Post by remarkEon »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #399
geden wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the solution? Where are the free nuclear plants? Sizewell C = £40 billion That’s a lot of PV solar and battery storage.

Trolling/Not Trolling. Imagine if we spent the money we did developing nuclear on photo voltaic and batteries instead. Because seriously we spent next to NOTHING on PV solar and batteries.

Yeah I too long for a future (or a present, I guess?) where entire fields and mountainsides are covered in glass on top of the natural landscape, instead of a football field sized building used to hold rocks close together to boil water.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#553

Post by crote »

Manuel_D wrote: post #154
Arodex wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thermodynamics are the reason why SMR aren't, and will never, be economical. A bigger nuclear reactor will always undercut your price per watt.

The value propositions of SMRs are logistics and re-use of existing infrastructure. The idea is that you could have easily transportable reactors that you can plop down in an existing coal plant, and then reuse the turbine, dynamo, etc. that are already in place. The fact that we haven't seen more widespread use of SMRs suggests that you're right. But it's important to point out that there are cost saving opportuniti…

But they'll never be small enough to be truly portable. It'll be closer to another Akademik Lomonosov [0] than a truck-sized diesel generator, which severely limits its deployment options.

The additional per-site engineering required to reuse things like turbines and dynamos is almost certainly going to kill any savings it would have. If you're already shipping a building-sized reactor, what's one more turbine? Realistically the main reusable component is the grid hookup itself - but that would incentivize building a large-scale reactor on the site.

As would reusing the turbines, for that matter: you can't exactly power the turbines of a 100MW coal plant with a 10MW reactor, and shipping ten inefficient 10MW reactors to the site just so you can reuse the existing ancient turbine isn't exactly an attractive option either.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#554

Post by throw0101c »

esarbe wrote: post #221
UltraSane wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear reactors can last up to 80 years. The main reason nuclear hasn't displaced fossil fuels over the last 70 years is due to relentless irrational opposition.

No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative. We stopped building nuclear reactors in the 1970ies[0] because with the additional complexity to make them safe, the systems were just too expensive. It has nothing to do with "relentless irrational opposition". [0] https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Nuclear-Reactor-Construct...

> No reactor has yet even reached the operating age of 60 years. That 80 years number is wholly speculative.

Ontario's Bruce A site (Units 1-4) have an age of ~45 years, and has just finished refurbishment (ahead of schedule and under budget) to run for another few decades:

* https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/refurbishment-of-bruce...

Ontario's Pickering B nuclear site (Units 5-8) have an age of ~40 years, and are about to be refurbished to run another 30+ years:

* https://archive.is/https://www.thestar.com/politics/provinci...

So while the 60-80 years has not been hit, it is probably less on the "speculative" side of spectrum and more on the "probable" side.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#555

Post by frollogaston »

leonidasrup wrote: post #483
TheCondor wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did waste management become a solved problem? In Colorado they shut down their last reactor (a very modern, at the time, thorium unit) in 1989 and there is still tons of waste product onsite since Yucca mountain was the designated target for it and it never came online. It's in a river basin and the containment facility is supposedly insanely robust (can withstand 300mph winds, etc..) but it's still there and I think…

Waste management has been solved problem. "A number of mercury, cyanide and arsenic waste repositories are operating worldwide including Canada (Giant Mine) and Germany (potash mines in Herfa-Neurode and Zielitz). Radioactive waste storage sites are under construction with the Onkalo in Finland being the most advanced." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository "The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP…

Every time someone mentions a year where nuclear started being "safe," I find an incident after that year where radioactive or otherwise toxic materials were leaked into the surrounding environment, plus plenty of near misses. Broader than waste though.

Maybe focus on how the likely alternatives are worse. The world isn't going to run completely on renewables, and coal puts surefire poison AND radioactive isotopes into the air.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#556

Post by crote »

0-_-0 wrote: post #230
Arodex wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your small nuclear reactor is going to need almost as much engineering , plumbing, safety mechanism, personnel, maintenance, etc... as your big nuclear reactor.

Not if it's mass produced

Mass-produced reactors don't need operators or guards?

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#557

Post by nazgul17 »

bjourne wrote: post #327
subscribed wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about building new, now, with very expensive nuclear and very cheap and performant solar. Not entirely a good faith argument given the Op's sentiment about the wasted past. Or, let me rephrase, how much fossils have been burned to date because nuclear got basically snuffed? We can probably express an answer in Celsius.

Ah, the nuclear Dolchstoßlegende. Since the mid 1980's nuclear construction basically came to a grinding halt, due to cost overruns and delays. It has never recovered and never will. Economics, not a Greenpeace conspiracy, killed new nuclear and also will kill current nuclear. It's not much to cry about that inefficient stuff gets replaced with more efficient stuff.

Isn't this a consequence of Linear No-threshold, a model that most policy is based on, that says that the bad health consequences of radioactivity are linear wrt the amount of radiation, and that there is no threshold whatsoever under which the radiation is harmless?

A model that is not based on science, given we know that cells have repair mechanisms? Jesus, even bananas are somewhat radioactive, so why are they being sold if any radiation is bad?

Thankfully, it seems the winds are changing in the US, where LNT is being replaced by science based models by regulatory bodies. I hope the rest of the world swiftly follows. The amount of deaths and damage and suffering and money that could have been avoided is mind boggling. If I imagine an alternate history where starting 70 years ago (even just some of) the money invested on fossil fuels or used to subsidize them had been directed to nuclear, and what the state of science today could be, what the state of the air could be, the number of floods, tornadoes, lung cancers that could have been avoided, forced displacements that could have been avoided and subsequent depressions and suicides (see Fukushima), my blood boils. It truly is a mistake of disproportionate scale, and a matching shame.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#558

Post by Handrail »

I'm amazed that the main debate on how clean or dangerous nuclear energy is still circles around the plants themselves and storage of spent energy. I believe that glaring oversight here is that enriched nuclear fuel doesn't grow on trees. Somehow no one ever seems to talk about how efficient and clean the mining of these rare earths is and in which countries that happens. Nuclear being a clean energy is a myth as far as I know. Actually relevant information would be how the necessary mining for uranium etc. compares to coal. I suspect it is only slightly better

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#559

Post by throw0101c »

moogly wrote: post #401
bilekas wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland has an amazing opportunity to be the standard setter in the EU with nuclear though. The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days. It a real shame to leave it all on the table because of poorly designed and managed disasters.

> The technology is so unbelievably safe and efficient these days I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.

> I think you mean unbelievably expensive and takes an eternity to build outside of China and Korea.

Japan was able to start construction on a new nuclear reactor and have its construction (and start commercial service) with-in five years, and did so every year from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...

The first unit you build will be expensive, the second less so, the third even less. Economies of scale work just as well for nuclear plants as they do for widgets: Vogtle Unit 3 was expensive AF, Unit 4 cost 30% less.

Turns out if you don't know what you're doing, things can get be expensive because you're learning lessons along the way, but if/once you do know what you're doing costs drop.

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants

#560

Post by crote »

vablings wrote: post #103
Arodex wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>commercially operating And struggling, propped up by taylor-made laws and public money. >how have so many smart people and companies been duped into seriously considering SMR technology if SMRs apparently break the laws of thermodynamics? Never said they break the laws of thermodynamics. They are just inefficient and will never be more efficient than alternatives such as... Bigger nuclear reactors. Or solar. And how…

I think you have a misunderstanding of what a SMR is supposed to be. Nuclear power plants are eye watering levels of expensive. The require massive scale and cost with lengthy approvals and requirements, the fundamental idea of SMRs is to move that cost and approvals into a smaller scale so that multiple standard units can be produced and deployed in a turnkey situation, they still will be expensive but the time to d…

> We also know SMRs work very well, considering the majority of the US Navy is powered entirely with SMRs

And what's their cost per MWh?

Considering they are fueled by highly-enriched uranium: are you okay with most of the world being handed the capability to build nukes?

Post reply on HN