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To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

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Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#601

Post by drawnwren »

afterburner wrote: post #540
rvail2 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In 30 years" lol, at least the amount of time claimed for the solution is becoming more realistic. 20 years ago, people claimed solar was going to take over in "10 years".

You completely misunderstood me. I'm saying nuclear isn't going to get much better on the next thirty years, while solar has been and is already better, and is getting even better every year. Nuclear costs have been understated since they came out.

This is all predicated on fusion not panning out, correct? I'd also be very surprised to see that there have been no advances that made nuclear more efficient or safe in the last 30 years.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#602

Post by AnimalMuppet »

afterburner wrote: post #599
paulddraper wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't want a plant from the 60s Me neither. Unfortunately, that's all we have, since we're not building any more :(

I feel like you're missing why I said this. I was responding to this sentence in the message above mine: "Actual, real-life plants (like from the 60s) have much lower costs than recent estimates have claimed (adjusted for inflation)." Why were those plants cheap? First a) they probably actually weren't, thanks to hidden costs, and b) they probably weren't nearly as safe.

And "not safe" = "increased likelihood of some really big unexpected hidden costs".

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#603

Post by Thorncorona »

natch wrote: post #496
daveheq wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how the nuclear reactor is managed. Have companies shown they care about the people over profit? Has government proven to not be inept at regulations and inspections and punishments? On top of that, a natural disaster can cause one to melt down. If we move to thorium, it's almost impossible to have a disaster, but it can't be made into a weapon and the profits are low so nobody wants to build the best s…

"best source of feasible big power known to man." I'd prefer small power. Nuclear is too centralized. It leaves all the control in the hands of government and corporations. It is inherently biased to control by large entities, rather than the individual.

You can't feasibly construct small power though. It's hard enough to run an electrical grid built on "big power." Very expensive too. With "small power" you would have to completely change all existing infrastructure along with costs of small power generation . Just think of how long and how much it costed for decentralized computing to become a "thing." and computing is practically cost free when compared to computing

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#604

Post by philipkglass »

robryk wrote: post #556
nkurz wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

David Mackay's "Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air" has good numbers comparing many different forms of energy storage: http://www.inference.eng.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/ . It's a "hard-headed" engineering look at our energy options written by a physicist. It might be a bit outdated (published in 2008), but when it came out it was the best compendium I'd seen.

Note that some of the statements there (e.g. estimates of areas needed to provide power from solar energy) are not technology-dependent (ie. are about physical limitations).

MacKay's estimate of areas needed to provide power from solar energy are technology-dependent. See for example:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41....

"If a breakthrough of solar technology occurs and the cost of photovoltaics came down enough that we could deploy panels all over the countryside, what is the maximum conceivable production? Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have 10% × 100 W/m^2 × 200 m^2 per person ≈ 50 kWh/day/person.

I assumed only 10%-efficient panels, by the way, because I imagine that solar panels would be mass-produced on such a scale only if they were very cheap, and it’s the lower efficiency panels that will get cheap first."

This assumption was invalidated by the actual trajectory of solar power since 2008. Nobody is building solar farms with 10% efficiency panels any more. Low efficiency is too expensive -- because it requires more glass and aluminum for the panels, more cabling, racking, and labor for installation. Low cost, low efficiency Chinese panels, like the GCL Poly ones used at India's giant new solar farm that HN just had an article about, are now in the mid-teens. (I looked up the data sheet after getting a glimpse of the GCL shipping crates on that Indian project site):

http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/PV-Specials/GCL%20245.pdf

If they used the middle-of-the-road GCL‐P6‐60‐240 that's a 14.7% module; 47% better than MacKay estimated as the best one could hope for from large scale solar projects. And the minimum competitive efficiency for even low-price panels is still creeping up. (Though large scale storage sufficiently affordable to get UK energy primarily from PV is still but a dream.)

MacKay also made the challenge look even bigger than it is by estimating the energy consumption of a "typical moderately-affluent person" and then multiplying that value by the whole population of the UK: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c2/page_22....

This leads to large over-estimates relative to actual measured UK energy consumption, particularly from air travel and automobile travel.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#605

Post by dredmorbius »

Reason077 wrote: post #488
spangry wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse. Unless we develop viable (and affordable) grid-level battery technology, the intermittency problem of renewables makes most of them a non-starter from a cost perspective. To cover 'always on' baseload demand, you need about 5-6 time that amount of maximum generating capacity, optimally geographically dispersed to ensure at least one or a few are producing sufficient power while the others are essential…

and also the second safest form of power generation, according to the IPCC, over its entire life-cycle (from mining to waste disposal and remediation). Incidentally, hydro is the first. I'm surprised that hydro could be considered safer than nuclear. That seems incorrect based on past experience. Hydro dam failures have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths during the past 50 years or so. That's far more than Cherno…

I've studied and written on the Banquiao Dam Failure, (1975, by the way) several times. It's an interesting failure, particularly as compared with nuclear disasters.

First and foremost, it was an administration, planning and design failure, compounded by weather, enineering, response, and other factors.

The background was adminstrative pride, ignored engineering warnings, insufficient spillways, poor communications, and no disaster planning.

The immediate trigger was an unprecedented "perfect storm" -- the collision of a tropical typhoon and a cold front -- unleashing 1,000+ mm of rain in 24 hours, completely overwhelming the dam.

The area was densely populated, what communications there were were down on account of the storm, and rougly 20,000 people were killed in the immediate flooding. The remaining 100,000 deaths occurred due to disease and starvation in the area as a result of no effective disaster and recovery response.

The most telling characteristics of Banqiao though are these:

1. Some 40 years after the incident, the region is not a nondiscretionary multi-centennary wildlife preserve and exclusion zone, but home to some 17 million inhabitants. That is, once a flood zone stops being a flood zone, it returns to its previous state relatively quickly.

2. Banqiao itself is far and away the most extreme accident of its type. There have been other major dam-related incidents, in India and Italy (Vajont Dam tsunami), but each was some two orders of magnitude lower in deaths than Banqiao.

The common elements in virtually all dam disasters are 1) poor understanding of risks, 2) suppression of criticisms, and 3) poor or no warning systems.

Keep in mind that dams are simple systems from an engineering standpoint: a large mass of material which regulates water flows. And yet these do fail with some regularity most especially in less-developed areas. The premise that the complexity of nuclear power plants will somehow pose fewer risks lacks credibility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

https://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/the-forgotten-...

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#606

Post by Retric »

mason240 wrote: post #551
Retric wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side. Also, a reasonable penalty for unwanted risk bumps up the costs. Further the value of property and possessions likely increases faster than inflation making the time value equation tricky. More importantly Nuclear is already to expencive before this cost, increasing things further and it's really not worth it.

>100,000 homes within 40 miles is probably on the low side. Homes, not people. 100k would be a very high number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Point_Energy_Center for example is close to and up river of NYC.

So, as an average 100,000 seems low even if the median might be below that.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#607

Post by crystalmeph »

pdog wrote: post #468
mseebach wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, there can be little doubt that a substantial fraction of the high cost of nuclear is down to almost the entire west being scared stiff of the stuff for thirty years. If we gave actual scientists and engineers a real mandate to come up with a pragmatic, realistic (ie accepting a small amount of risk as acceptable, perhaps something on the scale of a single Fukushima every 30 years, just like we accept a small a…

Fukushima was a failure of risk engineering. It's sad that you seem to think that we need to "accept" man-made disasters.

>>It's sad that you seem to think that we need to "accept" man-made disasters.

There will never be a completely safe man-made system.

For example, when designing a system for Functional Safety[0], none of the applicable standards (IEC 61508, ISO 13849, etc.) require that the product eliminate risk completely, because that is literally impossible in any complex system.

Instead, you reduce the risk based on the expected harm according to the function "[likelihood of dangerous incident / time unit] * [amount of harm caused if dangerous incident occurs]" until that expected harm is below a certain threshold.

Even accounting for Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, etc., nuclear already outperforms other sources of centralized power generation when you measure the deaths per unit energy produced[1]. Politically, the public may never accept this simple truth, because we are afraid of "big" things far out of proportion to their average actual danger to us. But it is a simple truth nonetheless.

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

[1]http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energ...

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#608

Post by spangry »

theptip wrote: post #589
spangry wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Production and use of solar and wind cause more deaths for GW/H than current nuclear fission (which is responsible for around 19.5% of the US' energy generation [0]). The problem is that deaths from nuclear generation are concentrated in very short, dramatic events. I mean, if you're looking for the biggest killer (by at least an order of magnitude), it's fossil fuels: boringly due to the reduction in air qua…

The fully-baked lifetime costs of nuclear power are quite vigorously debated; it's hard to get accurate numbers, since in general there are unpriced government insurance policies backing the plants (i.e. the government will step in to pay the $10B cleanup costs in the unlikely event that something goes wrong). One way of attempting to answer this question is to look at France, where 75% of their power is nuclear; the…

My thinking is pretty similar to yours. Especially the point on subsidies, although I would modify it slightly: if subsidies are employed (explicitly, or implicitly in the case of 'nuclear insurance'), governments should aim to keep them as technologically neutral as possible. I'm not arguing against subsidies (especially at this point): if it's a choice between climate catastrophe or handing out subsidies I'd definitely go with the subsidies. However, I think it's counter-productive (and more costly in the long-run) for governments to distort alternative energy markets by 'picking winners' (as they always seem to do). In other words, subsidise equally.

Carbon pricing always seemed like the elegant, 'neutral' solution to me, but it doesn't seem very popular. Also people seem to have trouble understanding that it makes perfect sense to cycle the revenue back to individuals (e.g. tax cuts), as the point is to make co2 emission intensive activity relatively more expensive (meaning people efficiently substitute away).

On the solar costs, it sounds like you've made a fair calculation (although I'm by no means an expert either, so not really qualified to make any kind of judgement). Although one other factor (which you might have already built in to your unit price) is the cost of transmission infrastructure: renewables (particularly wind) need to be geographically distributed to ameliorate their intermittancy issues (i.e. the wind only blows in some parts or the country at any given time, the sun is only visible from some perspectives etc.). Either that or, as you pointed out, you need quite a lot of energy storage capacity. Most likely there's some optimal mixture of both.

There's two other bits of fission tech that could be real game-changers: small modular reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor) and sub-critical reactors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_amplifier). Although I get the sense the latter is a bit more speculative (even though we have all the bits of technology to make it work in theory).

And I should probably correct something that I think I (mistakenly) said earlier as well: nuke plants, although they can scale up and down to try and match demand, it apparently is not a fast process (meaning at least some energy storage or 'peaking'/'energy sinking' capacity is required, somewhat mitigated by good predictive models of demand).

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#609

Post by aianus »

douche wrote: post #434
aianus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you consider this an effective rebuttal but I live in a place (Ontario, Canada) that made the opposite move at the same time as Germany. All coal plants have been shut down and replaced with additional Nuclear, Hydro, and Natural Gas generation. We now have some of the cheapest electricity in the world (~$0.055 per kwh residential off peak vs. something crazy like $0.30 in Berlin) and haven't had a si…

Canada does have the advantage of having huge, almost depopulated areas with rivers suitable for hydro power. HydroQuebec can build dams pretty much where ever they feel like in the northern part of the province, with little of the collateral damage that similar projects would have in most of the US or in Europe.

Yet hydro is only 23% of Ontario generation vs 36% nuclear.

Re: To Slow Global Warming, We Need Nuclear Power (Op-Ed)

#610

Post by emilong »

jcrawfordor wrote: post #535
spangry wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, and sorry I guess I misspoke. Whatever works: pumping water up hill, spinning flywheels etc. all sound fine to me. It's simply a question of whether it meets current energy demand, environmental impact, and cost. Come to think of it, I've only ever looked at the per KW hour cost of batteries (lead-acid seems to be the clear winner). You wouldn't happen to have references for other energy storage methods?

A company called ARES is working on a system that basically consists of automated electric trains carrying bricks uphill to store and then coasting back downhill with them to retrieve power. Basically pumped hydro but without a need for large quantities of water (and really ideal for installation in the desert, where there's a lot of open land with gentle slopes). They say efficiency near 80% with a first installatio…

Is this the ARES you mean? http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

Love that they call it the ‘Sisyphus Railroad’.

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