Activists who embrace nuclear power • Hacker News Board

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#561

Post by PoignardAzur » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #336

screye wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Disposal of nuclear waste is a huge expense, but the main waste product generated by natural gas (CO2) gets away scot free despite literally being the cause of what might be our generation's biggest problem. The end-of-life expenses of nuclear plants are included in the cost sheets…

That's simply not true. Nuclear has always and is still receiving significant indirect subsidies. A huge subsidy that nuclear power gets is that plants are not insured against incidents (because essentially nobody is willing to sell them insurance), so it's essentially the state that does it. Also many argue that the nuclear waste storage costs are significantly underestimated, I mean I understand estimating cost for…

Part of the problem with Flamanville is notoriously that France hasn't built a new nuclear reactor for 20 years, and a lot of the expertise has been lost; also, the ASN's safety regulations have become a lot stricter in that time.

So I think overall GP's points apply.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

#562

Post by abernard1 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

thinkcontext wrote: post #429

abernard1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ok well lets settle it. how much waste would be produced if the whole country ran on nuclear? That waste goes into Yucca mountain, and it's behind / underneath 100s of meters of neutron heavy metals. If we were exclusively powered by nuclear power for a century without recycling, it'd be something like 100 football fields. Absolutely, completely, utterly inconsequential. 1 inch of neutron-heavy lead is enough to di…

> That waste goes into Yucca mountain Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it. The government collects a tax on nuclear generation and used it to construct Yucca Mountain but political considerations have blocked it being used. There is no current plan for long term storage of nuclear waste in the US.

> Yucca Mountain hasn't accepted waste and there is no plan for it to begin accepting it.

Replace Yucca Mountain with any out of the way mountain, and there are many around the world globally. (We wouldn't want to be shipping every nation's nuclear waste to one spot).

The point is that nuclear waste has been well understood for 75 years. The mechanism for how it's shielded, by natural means, is so well understood that the political destruction of these sites is a crime against science.

The fissile, radioactive isotopes came from mountains in the first place, and we're not telling people to not live by mountains.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by reedjosh » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

afterburner wrote: post #556

reedjosh wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas energy is traded through ERCOT, an energy market "...governed by a board of directors and subject to oversight by the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Texas Legislature." http://www.ercot.com/about

And they failed. You proved my point.

My point is the Texas energy market is a centralized Texas Legislature governed market. AKA not government-less.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by airhead969 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

glogla wrote: post #229

airhead969 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMRs like SSR heatpipes are interesting. The issues of decentralization of controlled nuclear sites are many. It's better to have many SMRs in one location for safety, security, and backbench of resources and talent for engineering and operations. Simply, it scales better. Giving every Tom, Jane, and Sally corporation or town an SMR is an absolutely terrible idea.

Oh sure, I understood the effort to make it easier to "plop down" bunch large plants at once, not hundreds of small ones - though those are kind of interesting in isolated locations. The other thing is old Soviet idea of using small nuclear reactors for heating - put small reactor to every town and run central heating to the housing estates, meaning you get to use close to 100 % of the heat output of the reactor, ins…

For local heating, ground source heat pumps are often a good idea.

Also, solar thermal energy storage is an idea, as well as the potential of solar PV hot working fluid cogen.

Stanford's SESI is interesting, but it would be awesome if solar, wind, or fusion could take the places of fission and methane in cogen applications.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by airhead969 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

Daho0n wrote: post #255

undefined1 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in a time when institutions and experts are failing all around us, I appreciate your optimism. but it's too much like a blind faith and devotion to priests for my tastes. and maybe they are right about every regulation, that's a possibility! but clearly something has gone wrong when we could have had a clean grid powered via nuclear energy by now. so I think it would be wise to question everything in the chain.

>in a time when institutions and experts are failing all around us I'm sorry but that is not happening IMO. What is happening is non-experts decide what to do without listening to institutions and experts. We are seeing the result of what you seem to be advocating. We should listen more to the experts and institutions and look at other places that have less of these kinds of problems, like Scandinavia.

Yes, exactly. It's a lack of trust in authority that many people are experiencing, and then they give-up promoting competent national leadership entirely, but this doesn't translate into declining institutions or actual experts. Placing profits and politics over results and societal needs just leads us down the golden brick road to hubris.

There are many countries around the world that implemented good ideas (Where To Invade Next?), like Finland baby boxes and no school homework, France with proper school lunches, Italy's work day and labor relations, and many countries with adequate healthcare and free college. It's better to borrow good ideas than believe everything is excellent when there are areas that need improvement.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by airhead969 » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #204

airhead969 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh so now some nuclear industry regulations are "bad." Then who knows better than NRC engineers and scientists, legitimately aiming to ensure the industry doesn't die from mass-casualty events, public harm, or unworkable costs? Maybe before throwing shade on something you know nothing about, it's often best to not prove that you're speaking from your tail end. ; ) EDIT: You made a bunch of edits. No, you in particula…

Move fast, break things - if only we could innovate in nuclear energy... It’s telling that all these experts who complain about regulations can’t point to a single one being a problem.

I think ultimately innovating in fission is a dead-end. Fusion is the way forward, even if it takes 50 or 100 years to realize, regardless of ambitious startups. But it's true, many so-called "experts" throw shade FUD on regs without evidence and without an impact analysis.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 5:11 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #348

epistasis wrote: post #8

Articles like this miss the main point and instead focus on culture war material. There are plenty of sites that would happily accept more nuclear being built, but all other forms of energy have undercut the cost of nuclear. It's no longer cost competitive, and places like China that adopt a "let's try everything and see what works best" approach have heavily pulled back on nuclear. The issues aren't safety, waste, a…

As I said the other day, nuclear energy is the Amiga of energy sources. Ahead of its time, it was unjustly rejected and persecuted by the ignorant masses. Its advocates are bonded by the quiet pride that at least they weren't unthinkingly siding with those masses. (And they're right!) Meanwhile, as the Amiga stagnated for terribly unfair reasons, other, scrappier technologies like the i386 and UMG-Si grew from being…

Guru Meditäyshun!

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by LargoLasskhyfv » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

glogla wrote: post #116

epistasis wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always ask: what regulation would you change? Nobody in the nuclear industry has suggestions for what is unnecessary, as far as I can tell. And as Texas showed us last week, without regulations, profit motive alone is not enough to maintain proper equipment. The nuclear plant that tripped off could have made months worth of profit in less than a day. Yet they did not do simple weatherization preparations that they…

One common complaint is that every plant is a special snowflake that is validated, qualified and certified from scratch. Building more at once as a single project using a single plan could bring a lot of efficiency in the process. I think that was the promise of Small Modular Reactors - you certify reactor by itself, making the plant certification much easier and faster. I'm not sure that materialised, though.

I really don't understand that special snowflake thing.

From time to time I ride my bicycle along the levees of the Elbe river from Hamburg to Brunsbüttel. There are two NPP's on the way(now shut down, or in the process of being so. One on the other side of the river, Stade already is.).

Anyways, one called 'Brokdorf' irritated me. Why? Because it looks exactly like that thing in Iran called 'Busher' which I've seen in the media!

Why is that? Because Siemens built it there in license from whomever. Only the painting of the heavy lift shaft on the side of the reactor is different.

While there may be many differences in the details of the implementation inside I feel this special snowflake thing is an unnecessary complication.

Because viewed from afar there are maybe two to three dozen common types cookie cutted all over the world.

Should be possible for the insides also.

Just saying.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by sir_bearington » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #548

sir_bearington wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a lot more "in favor of the truth" than "in favor of renewables". And the truth is that there's plenty of lithium, but not with current extraction techniques.. And the truth is that I only ever said that there isn't enough grid storage available to make renewables feasible for decarbonization. The notion that I ever said there wasn't enough lithium in the earth's crust isn't the truth. Sure, there's more lithiu…

Thanks, this is good stuff! Just to clarify one thing: > You're comparing figures on generation to storage . Yes, a big nuclear plant that generates 2.5 GW of electricity often costs $15 billion … buying 2 gigawatt hours grants you the ability to store enough energy to output 2 GW for a duration of 1 hour I'm clear on the distinction between power and storage capacity; that's why I said, "Li-ion was about US$111/kWh…

> the other 12 hours, so if you wanted to feed the entire California demand from expanded solar generation, you'd need to store up 420 gigawatt hours (1.5 PJ). You'd need 12 kWh of batteries per (average) kilowatt, which would bring the price of storage to above US$13000 per kW at the battery prices I found two years ago, which is slightly higher than the price of thermal power generation.

And you'll have to pay this cost every 4-8 years, too.

And once you talk about load shifting, you're adding in a while bunch of other invisible costs to accommodate the shifting load. E.g. making it so that trains only run at night and on windy days, that increases cost of logistics across the board, which in turn makes a whole bunch of other goods and services more expensive.

Re: Activists who embrace nuclear power

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Post by jasonwatkinspdx » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 6:15 PM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #557

rstuart4133 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Afaik, nuclear energy is more expensive only because it is regulated far beyond what any other form of energy for the same level of risk. Nuclear's problems are neatly encapsulated by one number. It's called the learning rate. The learning rate is how the unit cost of production changes as production increases. As a general rule the more you make, the better you get at it and so the costs reduces. The fast the cost…

Solar is great but until you can store a week's worth of backup power while the weather makes demand spike and while clouds block 70% of the sunlight not accounting for snow and ice covering it I think we are going to need fossil fuel unless OR nuclear. Unless you want to see what happened in Texas last week X10

The intermittency of renewables was not what happened to Texas. Texas made a conscious choice to build their own isolated grid. Then they failed to invest in winterization of their grid sufficiently. The rolling blackouts were caused by gas turbine plants going offline, though the intermittency of solar and wind in Texas didn't help.