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The Nuclear Option

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Re: The Nuclear Option

#61

Post by squirrelicus »

rtpg wrote: post #30
rurounijones wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can get the "We cannot build them in time" part but the whole "It is not economical to build them" strikes me as a pretty crazy position to take. Uneconomical compared to the massive disruption that climate change will bring to our civilization? Are we fighting to save our future or not? Discarding a proven technology that will massively reduce our carbon emission for an unproven "We still have problems to solve ar…

It's not that nuclear is unproven, it's that _renewables at this point are proven_. You can build huge (or tiny! it's super scalable) fleets of renewable energy sources pretty economically, with a ~0% chance of making surrounding areas uninhabitable for 20 years if there's a failure. Yeah sure a truckload of uranium goes a long way but building the plants is really hard even when you look past the regulatory issues.

I think you're overstating the provenness of renewables. There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle.

I also think your overstating the risk involved in nuclear power. Even fukushima was pretty tame, and unlike Japan the USA has lots of relatively uninhabited real estate we can put the plants on.

Cost is one factor. Location is another. Reliability another. Risk another. Nuclear is a system of tradeoffs that is very hopeful for fighting emissions.

Of course this is all moot since even if the USA and Europe went to zero emissions, we won't make a dent in climate change. The developing world must be addressed with at least as much urgency as the West must be addressed.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#62

Post by godelski »

rurounijones wrote: post #54
godelski wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate is a matter of economics though. The difference is that the cost is in the future. That's why the poster was talking about the cost of climate and if you consider it an existential crisis. I guess it also matters if you care about current costs vs future costs.

As a sidenote. I also have trouble understanding the mindset of people who argue purely on economic basis. It seems that telling out grandchildren "Sorry you inherited a ruined climate, but we didn't want to spend the money at the time to avoid it" is a rational decision. (And hey, maybe some people think it is; but I can't)

I honestly think they fall into one of 2 camps:

1) They don't believe in anthropocentric climate change (probably deflecting by taking this stance)

2) They don't believe the economic destructive power of climate change. Be that by disbelief, thinking it is over stated, or just not being good at thinking about the future (which a lot of humans aren't. We're terrible at it)

Re: The Nuclear Option

#63

Post by rjf72 »

rurounijones wrote: post #50
darkmarmot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a very simple large-scale storage system that's already in use across the world: pumping water uphill. It's just not as economical as rain when you factor in the efficiency losses from generating and transferring power twice.

And pumping water uphill is a regional solution that requires specific regional geography, to me that does not class as "scalable". I should be more specific in that to me "scalable" is a solution that can be deployed anywhere without require specific regional properties. Maybe you think this is unneeded and that a lot of region specific solutions can cover the storage requirements. However another posted did point o…

It doesn't require specific geography. You can create entirely artificial pump systems isolated from any natural water. These are called closed loop systems. You could create an closed loop pumped hydroeletric system in the middle of the Sahara if so desired. Incidentally you could power the entire world with a solar area taking up a single digit percent of the Sahara.

These haven't been actively developed in the past because we don't have much need for massive storage and they also take something on the order of a couple of years to plan, develop, and execute. You need the demand to be there before the storage is built, but the demand won't exist until the storage is built. Fun problems. Because of this batteries are a more practical immediate solution. They can be deployed anywhere, at practically any scale, with negligible time requirements. And similarly for manufacturing. Since they aren't 'geo locked' their market flexibility is much greater.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#64

Post by ben_w »

squirrelicus wrote: post #61
rtpg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nuclear is unproven, it's that _renewables at this point are proven_. You can build huge (or tiny! it's super scalable) fleets of renewable energy sources pretty economically, with a ~0% chance of making surrounding areas uninhabitable for 20 years if there's a failure. Yeah sure a truckload of uranium goes a long way but building the plants is really hard even when you look past the regulatory issues.

I think you're overstating the provenness of renewables. There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle. I also think your overstating the risk involved in nuclear power. Even fukushima was pretty tame, and unlike Japan the USA has lots of relatively uninhabited real estate we can put the p…

> There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle.

On the contrary, two solutions already exist.

Batteries are expensive, but (IIRC) still cheaper than nuclear, though more expensive than fossil fuels.

And the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost-advantage that solar has. You could literally power your home at night from the sun hitting the other side of the planet. (That said, I have no idea what the Installation or maintenance or political costs are, only the efficiency).

Re: The Nuclear Option

#65

Post by pdonis »

ben_w wrote: post #64
squirrelicus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overstating the provenness of renewables. There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle. I also think your overstating the risk involved in nuclear power. Even fukushima was pretty tame, and unlike Japan the USA has lots of relatively uninhabited real estate we can put the p…

> There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle. On the contrary, two solutions already exist. Batteries are expensive, but (IIRC) still cheaper than nuclear, though more expensive than fossil fuels. And the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost- advantage that solar…

> the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost-advantage that solar has. You could literally power your home at night from the sun hitting the other side of the planet.

You're comparing apples and widgets. The losses of planet-scale grids are way too large to make it even feasible to power your home at night from the other side of the planet: not enough power would be left by the time it got to you. The cost is irrelevant.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#66

Post by squirrelicus »

ben_w wrote: post #64
squirrelicus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're overstating the provenness of renewables. There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle. I also think your overstating the risk involved in nuclear power. Even fukushima was pretty tame, and unlike Japan the USA has lots of relatively uninhabited real estate we can put the p…

> There's a lot of support infrastructure that hasn't been invented that is required to produce the roughly 3 terawatt average per day as well as the storage for the daily cycle. On the contrary, two solutions already exist. Batteries are expensive, but (IIRC) still cheaper than nuclear, though more expensive than fossil fuels. And the losses of planet-scale grids are small compared to the cost- advantage that solar…

Batteries are also one of the worst environmentally destructive things to mass produce given current best technology. So there's that.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#67

Post by pdonis »

dv_dt wrote: post #18

Just about every builder and operator of large nuclear fleets of reactors have all outright said or implied by their actions that nuclear is uneconomical vs renewable power options. The massive bulge of capital and scheduling needed points to humans not being able to build a next generation of nuclear plants in time to head off the worst climate change, and renewable energy sources being both faster and cheaper to bu…

None of this has anything to do with technical problems with building nuclear reactors. The US Navy has been hiring private contractors to build them for decades with no such issues. (And Naval reactors have more stringent requirements than commercial ones, because of the widely varying loads they have to deal with.)

The so-called "cost savings" in France are due to unrealistically optimistic assumptions about renewables, not any issues with nuclear.

The issues in the US are entirely legal and political: nuclear power plant projects get tied up by interminable lawsuits based on NIMBYism and ignorance, and the US political policies on fuel reprocessing have turned what should have been an easily solved problem into a quagmire.

I suspect the "problems" in China are more due to their cavalier attitude towards coal than anything else; they don't mind firing up a lot of new coal plants and having lots of people suffer respiratory disease and death as a result, if that's cheaper than nuclear.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#68

Post by AnthonyMouse »

godelski wrote: post #62
rurounijones wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sidenote. I also have trouble understanding the mindset of people who argue purely on economic basis. It seems that telling out grandchildren "Sorry you inherited a ruined climate, but we didn't want to spend the money at the time to avoid it" is a rational decision. (And hey, maybe some people think it is; but I can't)

I honestly think they fall into one of 2 camps: 1) They don't believe in anthropocentric climate change (probably deflecting by taking this stance) 2) They don't believe the economic destructive power of climate change. Be that by disbelief, thinking it is over stated, or just not being good at thinking about the future (which a lot of humans aren't. We're terrible at it)

There are two issues here. One is, are we currently pricing carbon appropriately? And obviously not. But if we did then it would be an economic issue -- make emitting carbon more expensive than alternatives and people would naturally gravitate to alternatives.

But then we have the second issue, which is that we don't want the alternatives to be significantly more expensive than the status quo, and we may want to take some steps to ensure that.

If you tax carbon and so people switch to renewables and batteries and figure out how to make it scale efficiently, everything is fine. If not, people would then turn to nuclear because it would still be less than paying the carbon tax.

But if we wait to start building nuclear plants until after we've already established whether or not renewables can handle the entire grid, and then it turns out they can't, that could be problematic, because then you've waited too long.

It's a hedge. If we fix the nuclear regulations to remove the most egregious of the cost-wasting portions and start building nuclear plants now, and then we don't need them because renewables fully succeed, energy will cost modestly more than it would have. Or the investors in nuclear would lose money in that case. Whereas if we don't, and then we do need them, energy would cost dramatically more than it would have because of the shortfall. And as a result people would be inclined to pay the carbon tax, or repeal it, and then we get catastrophic climate change.

When "need it and not have it" is literally the end of the world, better to have it and not need it. That seems like a worthwhile hedge.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#69

Post by pdonis »

rurounijones wrote: post #31
skybrian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the right metric. The question is whether you can sell electricity for a lower price than the competition or will end up selling electricity at a loss, resulting in "stranded costs" for rate payers. To do that comparison, you need to predict prices in the electricity market for many decades. Predicting the future is hard, but the trend for solar and wind costs is pretty clear and it seems foolish to bet ag…

> That's not the right metric. I guess that opinion comes down to whether you think Climate Change is an existential threat to our civilisation or not. If you are of the opinion that it is then costs be damned and build everything: Renewables, Storage, Nuclear. If we end up with more power than we need then we can shutdown excess or funnel that into powering carbon capture technologies if we ever get there. If you ar…

> I guess that opinion comes down to whether you think Climate Change is an existential threat to our civilisation or not.

Not necessarily. I don't think climate change is an existential threat to our civilization; human civilization has already dealt with problems much bigger than the average temperature going up by a couple of degrees and sea level rising a couple of feet. (Personally, I think the biggest existential threat to human civilization comes from humans with false beliefs and too much political power.)

And yet, I think nuclear energy should be a no-brainer. (I have no problem with renewables or storage either; I just don't think they can provide enough reliable base load power by themselves.) Why? Because we need to stop buying foreign oil for national security reasons. Which is not an economic reason--economically speaking, oil is still pretty cheap--but I still think it's a good one.

Re: The Nuclear Option

#70

Post by rurounijones »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #68
godelski wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think they fall into one of 2 camps: 1) They don't believe in anthropocentric climate change (probably deflecting by taking this stance) 2) They don't believe the economic destructive power of climate change. Be that by disbelief, thinking it is over stated, or just not being good at thinking about the future (which a lot of humans aren't. We're terrible at it)

There are two issues here. One is, are we currently pricing carbon appropriately? And obviously not. But if we did then it would be an economic issue -- make emitting carbon more expensive than alternatives and people would naturally gravitate to alternatives. But then we have the second issue, which is that we don't want the alternatives to be significantly more expensive than the status quo, and we may want to take…

You explained and expanded on my thoughts brilliantly, cheers.
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