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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#661

Post by realusername »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #598
realusername wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renewables and storage are always over delivering, while nuclear always under delivers Well no, storage would need another 100x improvement for being usable in a 100% renewable scenario in any country you have any sort of winter. Say what you want on nuclear but we have example of countries which managed it successfully, for renewables, we still haven't.

Which is entering emergency reserve territory. Nuclear power CAPEX to build an emergency reserve would seem to be utterly insane. The easy solution is gas turbines. We already have them and as aviation and maritime shipping decarbonize utilize the same fuel. Whether that is syngas, ammonia or biofuels. Or earmark the biofuels for grid usage. Today the US produces enough ethanol used as a blend in for gasoline to run…

I'm not sure I get your comment, France has 2 years worth of uranium ready to use + 5 years of uranium not enriched.

I don't think there's any other form of energy in the country which has a 7 years emergency reserve.

> As we switch to BEVs repurpose that for grid duties while ensuring the inputs also decarbonize.

BEV will make the storage problem worse because they consume more in winter and you can't tell people how to use their own cars.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#662

Post by krisoft »

epistasis wrote: post #292
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted, but you're correct. It's death by a thousand cuts, because ALARA forces radiation exposure-reduction expenditures to scale upward forever, despite the fact that radiation exposure from plants long ago reached levels far below those that result in any risk. There is no lower bound, so the regulators never stop reducing exposure further, raising costs further and further over time. Under ALARA…

ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor. However, my example is of reactors that China can build cost effectively, but which Europe can not. (And the AP1000 is an example where China can build the design cost effectively, but the US can not.) That would indicate that nuclear reactors could be built cost effectively, with the same design, and without changing…

> ALARA would indicate that the increased costs from regulation are due to the design of the reactor.

Yeah. Due to armies of highly paid experts spending almost a decade of their life arguing if the design is up to the regulations. And also when because of these uncertainties you start building before full approval and then requirements change.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#663

Post by pzo »

oezi wrote: post #523
casey2 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is just disinformation at this point. If nuclear was very expensive China wouldn't have built 30 in the last 10 years despite massive opposition. In reality when you take all the costs into account there is no cheaper form of energy generation and there likely never will be, outside of cost decreases in Fission based nuclear itself.

It is hard for humans to work with exponential curves. Solar went from 15 cents per kwh to 5 cents per kwh over the last 10 years. Anticipating such a rapid decline is hard and a lot of people still are stuck on outdated data. Sure China commissioned these plants in the past and will plan more, but it won't be due to cost.

But you don't need to work with exponential curves to know that you can use solar only for like half a day and even less during winter. Those solar installation now are big part of overall cost. And with majority of EU population living in flats where you gonna install them?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#664

Post by Saline9515 »

gpm wrote: post #307
mikepavone wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You totally can do it with some combination of overbuilding, storage and increased interconnection. It just starts to get expensive the higher the portion of your generation you want to supply with renewables. There's a good Construction Physics article[0] about this (though it simplifies by only looking at solar, batteries and natural gas plants and mostly does not distinguish between peaker and more baseload orient…

> Renewables make the net-demand curve (demand - renewable generation) very lumpy which generally favors dispatchable (peaker plants, batteries, etc.) generation over baseload. Even without renewables in the equation, the demand side of the curve is already extremely lumpy. If you're only affordable when you're operating near 100% of the time (i.e. "baseload") you simply can't make up the majority of power generation…

This is not how nuclear works. Nuclear sets a low price that corresponds to its cost, then lets more expensive marginal energy sources set the final price. Nuclear can by the way be modulated +20%\-20%, which makes it quite flexible in real condition. See https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ... as a proof - nuclear generation in France can go from 25GW to 45GW during a day.

New small modular reactors promise great improvements, as they can be pre-built in factories, require limited maintenance, lower risk, and as a result much lower cost per MW.

https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/small-modular-reactor...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#665

Post by Luc »

kubav027 wrote: post #659
pzo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.

Or rebuild the cooling technology to fit the new and future climate instead of the old one.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#666

Post by LunaSea »

LinXitoW wrote: post #583
zvrba wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed. This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is. EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpea…

I obviously don't know about Norway, but in most developed countries, the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure. While I can't prove it, it seems too convenient that people suddenly care about "nature" right after they've fucked it up for so many other reasons.

> the number one reason for habitat destruction or disruption is going to be animal agriculture, or highspeed road infrastructure

The surface of both of these things hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#667

Post by gnatolf »

pzo wrote: post #648
AndyPa32 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with cheapest. If you factor in twenty years build time and nuclear waste disposal, the whole thing is not economically viable. Then there's a problem with nuclear fuel. The sources are mostly countries you don't want to depend on. You are of course right with your assessment that nuclear is green, safe and eco-friendly. That's a hard one to swallow for a lot of eco activists.

but comparing to solar / wind there you also have to factor batteries production, battery replacement, wind turbine replacement and recycling (they are not easily recyclable), cleaning solar panels etc.

'recyclable' is such a vague term. E.g. radiation-affected typically easily recycled materials are very hard to deal with (think e.g. pipe steel from power plants) and are effectively non-recyclable, instead of close to 100% recyclable, as their non-contaminated counterparts.

Opposed to that, battery recycling is mostly hard to deal with in terms of economics, and admittedly the chemistry involved is complex, but at least from a technical point of view, plenty of solutions are available - and the tech is coming in relatively quickly now that the demand is there (remember, first generation EVs are just now getting closer to EOL).

It's slightly amusing that recycling of a wind turbine is treated as if it was a big deal - yes the laminated rotor parts can't be part of circular economies, but the total material amount of this laughably small. All the metal components are very easily recycled.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#668

Post by LunaSea »

gpm wrote: post #496
strawhatguy wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just looked at 2, using their own numbers, and it says 97% to 24/365, in a sunny area (Las Vegas), which is like an outage 43 minutes out of every day (24 * 0.03 * 60). That's not what many would consider as 24/365, and certainly not "every hour of every day".

That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants... https://www.nrdc.org/bio/rachel-fakhry/myth-247365-power-pla... This, like normal power plant outages, is fine because in reality the entirety of your power does not come from one specific place, from a specific type of power. Instead we load balance over different places using the grid, and energy sources. It's much much r…

> That's greater uptime than your average coal (85%), nuclear (91%) or gas (95%) power plants...

It really doesn't matter what the uptime of individual power plants is. What matters is the uptime for the consumer which is essentially 100% in EU countries.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#669

Post by kla-s »

mpweiher wrote: post #656
grafmax wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas isn’t climate friendly just because of its debatable attractiveness vs coal. And nuclear comes with catastrophic risks that require large costs to mitigate. Let’s not pretend it’s some panacea. Renewables are better than both.

Fun fact: The US achieved more for the climate with fracking gas than Germany did with its "Energiewende".

Do you care to explain more, id be interested :)

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#670

Post by ukblewis »

kubav027 wrote: post #659
pzo wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's not 24/7 and europe even worse in winter and fall. Solar is unrealistic to replace most energy usage [1]. In EU it's just less than 5% usage. In germany less than 6% usage. And wind is not a replacement either (less than 11% energy usage in germany). And just for comparison in france nuclear power plants provides 37% of energy [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

During summer french nuclear power plants reduced their energy production because there were problems with cooling caused by heat and drought. So we probably need mixture of all those technologies to make electrical grid stable. Even nuclear energy is not imune to climate change.

I would have thought the solution to drought and water shortages would be to desalinate and reduce water wasted in order to fix the problem. Using a “mix of technologies” is ignoring the problem and trying to work around it instead of fixing it. And given that clearly having extra capacity that you don’t need at any given point in time just in case things go wrong is likely extremely expensive, I don’t really see the incentive. Frankly, even a really simple stupid question: what do you do with solar and/or wind power when it is dark and/or not windy? In other words, those solutions would still not be sufficient to replace nuclear during heat and drought, instead, you would need storage, which could store power from any source, but fixing the root causes of issues with nuclear power would seem more rational to me
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