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Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

carnegiescience.edu

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Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#71

Post by Turing_Machine »

shafyy wrote: post #14
cameldrv wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes we do want to trade that. The toxic carbon byproduct goes into the air and causes massive disruption to the lives of billions of people. The toxic fission byproduct is tiny and goes underground in the middle of the desert and disrupts zero people's lives.

Because constructing nuclear power plants and mining uranium don't have toxic carbon byproducts? What are the toxic byproducts you are talking about specifically? > The toxic fission byproduct is tiny and goes underground in the middle of the desert and disrupts zero people's lives. Haha, if it were that easy. Nuclear waste can be radioactive up to 1 million years. Can you give me an example of a successful long-term…

> Nuclear waste can be radioactive up to 1 million years.

You do understand that "long half-life" = "less radioactive", by definition?

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#72

Post by Arnt »

lm28469 wrote: post #63
AndrewDucker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out that pumped storage can store power for months if necessary, but it can generally only supply electricity for several hours before it runs out. Whereas a nuclear powerplant will supply that electricity indefinitely. So if you have a wind lull that lasts several days you may run into issues unless you have a lot of pumped storage.

It's also worth pointing out that to pump water up hill you still need an energy source...

A simple problem if you're willing to pump that water uphill while the sun is shining.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#73

Post by pydry »

lm28469 wrote: post #60
glogla wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm happy that this is getting some attention. There will never he "just renewable" power grid due to renewables intermittency. The realistic options are renewables + some other energy source, or renewables + a lot of storage. Renewables + storage has a problem: energy storage at scale is not a solved problem at all, either it is hard to build (pumped hydro) not scalable (batteries) or barely in PoC stages (various a…

There is also a major issue with the current way renewables are used. They aren't used to replace existing sources, they're used on top of existing sources: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g... Renewable would only work if we stopped our quest for constant growth, which won't happen any time soon, in the meantime it's 90% marketing: "keep consuming it's green"

Currently every megawatt produced by wind is just a megawatt not produced by gas.

Storage doesnt really make economic sense until gas is consistently priced according to the environmental damage it does or wind starts massively overproducing.

Of course, nuclear makes little economic sense if you factor in disaster insurance, but nobody does. Nuclear power is simultaneously too dangerous for private insurers to touch with a barge pole and also apparently too safe for us to worry about it.

The cost of maintaining nuclear arsenals/submarines/etc. explodes without a nuclear industry so the UK, US, China, France, etc. are happy to throw oversized subsidies at it, let the taxpayer insure it all and run PR campaigns about how only it can save the planet.

...all while glaring angrily at Germany for turning off coal plants "too slowly" while slyly ignoring that Japan is turning a whole hell of a lot of them on.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#75

Post by bipson »

fsflover wrote: post #61
bipson wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say there are different opinions on that. I won't adopt definitions forced by countries that also want natural gas plants to be categorized as "green" ("who cares what they emit?!")

This is ad hominem. Nuclear doesn't generate the CO2.

Hm, no, I don't think that's ad hominem.

I didn't say nuclear does generate CO2. I said it produces waste, and that I have a definition of renewable that does not include nuclear.

You first shifted the goalposts and said it is "green" (what is "green"?? who defines "green"?), citing sources. I discredited the sources, since it these are just announcements, made by (political) institutions, where politicians lobby for a re-labeling of certain energy sources, because it suits their agenda.

None of this makes nuclear "renewable" in my book.

IMO the world renewable implies something in the line of "self-regenerating"/"grows naturally"/"replenishes" and producing toxic waste in my world-view is orthogonal to that meaning.

And don't try to explain that nuclear waste is non-toxic, I think my interest in discussing this really ends there.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#76

Post by Arnt »

glogla wrote: post #51
pydry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pumped hydro is "harder to build"? Fengning cost $1.8 billion for 3.6 gigawatts and took about 7 years to build. Hinkley point C will be about $30 billion dollars for 3.2 GW and will take about 10 years to build. Even prima facie I don't see how building a nuclear power plant could seem easy compared to pushing water uphill.

One of them being in China and the other being in UK would probably explain the costs by itself.

You mean that labour is cheap in China?

I've no idea whether it's representative, but I know a construction project where the labour costs were 12% of the final bill. That Hinkley Point project mentioned spends about $8m per day, how much does a construction worker cost per day in that area?

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#77

Post by fdewnijfwg »

danbruc wrote: post #58
fdewnijfwg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't want the toxic waste from Solar panel production nor the industrial waste or the noise pollution from windmills either. At some point we'll have to chose the lesser evil, and most of the good rivers have already been dammed so more hydro isn't really the solution. A combination of renewables, nuclear base power, reduced power needs, smart grid load management, and synth fuel production during peak production…

We don't want the toxic waste from Solar panel production [...] I am really tempted to call this one bullshit. I will admit that I just started reading about this topic half an hour ago because of this thread, so I may be wrong and I will happily change my mind if someone makes the case. I just skimmed the first page of search results for toxic solar panel waste. They mostly seemed rather negative, so I don't think I…

The production of silicon is hardly environmentally friendly [0]. There's also plenty of other materials included, and then there's chemicals required to produce the panels themselves. There's been a few incidents where PV producers have dumped waste straight into rivers and so on, but luckily they seem to be infrequent.

Recycling will, of course, bring the levels of waste down from old panels themselves, but we're still looking to replace a lot of fossil fuel-powered plants, and there's no way we'll get around the fact that we need more raw materials than we can obtain from recycling old panels. We'll also still get a lot of waste from the production of the new ones.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon#Production

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#78

Post by AndrewDucker »

pydry wrote: post #68
AndrewDucker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out that pumped storage can store power for months if necessary, but it can generally only supply electricity for several hours before it runs out. Whereas a nuclear powerplant will supply that electricity indefinitely. So if you have a wind lull that lasts several days you may run into issues unless you have a lot of pumped storage.

Also worth pointing out that * Newer wind turbines produce power a lot more consistently (being taller). * There's a huge amount of cheap, low hanging fruit with respect to demand shaping that we've barely scratched the surface of. E.g. aluminium smelters in germany dont particularly care about having a constant source of power they just want cheap. They dial up and down with the spot cost. Smart storage heaters can…

Week-long lulls are rare - but you do get prolonged periods of lower winds, so you need oversupply to deal with that: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/weak-winds-worse...

But absolutely, better despatch, better demand shaping, and better storage would all be awesome. I hope we can get storage cheap and prolific enough to avoid the need for nuclear entirely.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#79

Post by marmarama »

By the time any country in the west actually gets round to finishing enough grid-connected reactors to make a difference, we will be storing enough renewable energy through batteries and green hydrogen from seawater that the reactors will be expensive white elephants.

The ramp-up time on reactors is just too long, the capital investments too big, and the reactors themselves too inflexible. Combined with the lack of appetite from the public for new reactors, it's just not worth it.

Just like how wind and solar became cheap and widespread over the last decade, grid-scale energy storage is going to be the big change in the energy market over the coming decade.

Surprisingly, it's going to be the fossil fuel industry that will make it happen, because they have the money and the will, and because selling green hydrogen and gas turbine electricity generation capacity allows them to transition to a low carbon future without changing their business model much.

Re: Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

#80

Post by lm28469 »

Arnt wrote: post #72
lm28469 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth pointing out that to pump water up hill you still need an energy source...

A simple problem if you're willing to pump that water uphill while the sun is shining.

""Simple"" if you have the topography/natural resources to build it in the first place, ie not that simple
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