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Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#71

Post by salmo »

ska wrote: post #42
ant6n wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> France’s nuclear buildout, beginning in the 1970s, achieved the greatest decarbonization in human history I thought it was hydro in Quebec, or perhaps Norway.

Doesn't decarbonation imply replacing something? Lots of places with the right distributions of water use hydroelectric, because it was cheaper to build out. Ontario has craploads of water (hello, great lakes) but not much elevation, at least not in the right places.

Funny enough, "electricity" and "hydro" were synonymous in Toronto when I lived there in the early 90's because of Ontario Hydro. It was named for the electricity coming from Niagara Falls, but then yeah... like you said.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#72

Post by rglover »

arez wrote: post #53
jwie wrote: post #39

Anti nuclear fearmongering is based on ignorance for the most part, and a kind of exploitative cynicism on the other. Most people just don’t know how safe nuclear power is. I worked on a nuclear reactor personally. We used to joke that the safest thing we had in the power plant was the radiation. I received less operational exposure in 6 years than typical nuclear medicine procedures create. The other source is entre…

tell that to france and their inability to generate power with many reactors because either the rivers are dry or too hot. How is that a sustainable solution

Depends on perspective. I hadn't heard about this but looking it up quick and the reason it's considered too hot [1] is:

> After the 2003 heatwave, France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.

And also...

> Since 2000, production losses due to high river temperatures and low river flows have represented an average of 0.3% of annual production. However, half of EDF’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline due to planned maintenance and work to repair corrosion which was delayed by the pandemic, just as Europe faces an energy crunch following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

So, in essence the inability to use the water appears to be a regulatory/timing issue, not a technical one, as far as I can gather.

While I wouldn't advocate for harming wildlife, I'd say the answer to your question is "locate nuclear plant developments in areas that will have the least impact on wildlife (or, where wildlife can easily be relocated and protected from potential harm)."

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#73

Post by qqqwerty »

WalterBright wrote: post #11

Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...

That is an opinion piece from a conservative talking head. Maybe try linking to primary sources next time.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#74

Post by mwattsun »

dctoedt wrote: post #54
mwattsun wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in nuclear under normal operations is boring anyway and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators. At least on the submarine we'd scram the reactor and run drills. I'm sure civilian nuclear is less exciting than this. I had one buddy who did it for a career, but just one that I know of.

> and consists mostly of watching gauges and other indicators And logs. You forgot taking logs* — or is that done automatically these days? It's been decades since I've been in a nuclear plant, so I have no idea. * That is, recording readings of various indicators.

They're probably recorded automatically but logs are still taken as way to ensure human eyes are on the indicators, like security guards have to scan a waystation point to prove they were there. I haven't been in a plant for over three decades so I don't know either.

One thing I carried with me through life was to "always trust your indicators." It's too easy to look at an anomaly and conclude the gauge is broken.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#75

Post by Manuel_D »

fundatus wrote: post #62
Manuel_D wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators [1] is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get…

> Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get be…

Not coincidentally, that study only decided on 1976 for its analysis. If I order 6 plants of the same design, then drop the next batch down to 4 plants for the next run, then 2 plants for the third run, then I should expect the cost to go up as scale goes down.

Here's a publication that points this out. In fact, it calls out the article you linked specifically: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

See that cluster in the late 60s and early 70s: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

That's the benefits of scale. The slower pace of construction after that is accompanied by higher costs.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#76

Post by gene-h »

"During the 2021 Uri storm, Texas’s $66 billion in renewable energy investments failed to perform in a time of crisis" So did nuclear. A nuclear reactor in texas went offline for two days during the crisis due to cold weather taking 1.3 GW of capacity with it. The linked article the author cites mentions that the outage was primarily caused by the failure of thermal plants which hadn't been winterized rather than lack of wind power.

[0]https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight...

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#78

Post by epistasis »

WalterBright wrote: post #11

Effective CO2 reduction can only happen if a sensible and effective policy is taken, to wit: 1. a tax on the carbon content of fuels 2. nuclear plants for base load power and the rest will be taken care of by natural market forces. Green energy will never be practical without nuclear power: https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-...

The climate efforts of the past 20 years refute both of these claims decisively.

First, carbon taxes, when they have been enacted they have not been effective. And there are massive barriers to enacting them, because there is no constituency that advocates for them. The progress we have made with reducing emissions has been through industrial policy of various sorts, rather than through single taxes. For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong. And I think that the history of carbon taxes has shown them to be this obvious and unfortunately wrong solution.

Similarly, baseload, or more properly firm energy supply, can come from all sorts of carbon free sources. From storage (hydro or battery), to geothermal, to advanced geothermal, to hydrogen, to ammonia storage, to who knows what will be developed over the next few decades. We have a rich portfolio of solutions, and most of them are reducing in cost quickly. However nuclear is not reducing in cost, and it's not clear that it will ever be able to compete again. Attach 12 hours of storage to a solar array and you'll get a "baseload" source, and it will be cheaper than new nuclear.

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#79

Post by fundatus »

jjk166 wrote: post #70
fundatus wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After Chernobyl clouds containing radioactive material where blown westwards by the wind and eventually those clouds rained down over parts of Germany. To this day if you go out hunting for example wild boards in those areas they have to be tested for radioactivity before they can be processed further, since their diet mostly consists of mushrooms and plants that contain a lot of Caesium-137 from that rainfall back i…

Hundreds of thousands of people dying per year vs mild inconvenience for wild boar hunters is hardly a difficult choice.

my point obviously being that this still affects plants, animals and humans in a much larger area than just the surrounding area - which makes the argument "We could have a chernobyl every year for the next hundred years" not very compelling

Re: Who killed nuclear energy and how to revive it

#80

Post by Manuel_D »

qqqwerty wrote: post #68
Manuel_D wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators [1] is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get…

From the article: So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”

Plants built in the 1960s and 1970s did exceptionally well on a cost to energy ratio. They were also built in greater numbers than in the 1980s and onwards: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

The source given for that sentence is: Steve Isser, Electricity Restructuring in the United States: Markets and Policy from the 1978 Energy Act to the Present. So whatever that sentence is talking about, it happened after the period of rapid construction and cheap costs.

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