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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#711

Post by rootusrootus »

Manuel_D wrote: post #673
tialaramex wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is also in practice significantly geographically dependent. Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power statio…

What you're describing is substantially different than, say, attempting to build a dam in a flat place with no rivers. "It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here" Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar pa…

> There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe

That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#712

Post by Manuel_D »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #702
Manuel_D wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building enough battery to cover the night is still 20,000 to 30,000 GWh. For comparison, global annual battery output in 2025 was 2,200 GWh. Of which only ~ 300GWh went to grid storage. Even just diurnal storage for a completely renewable grid is a truly enormous amount of storage.

Given a 10-15 year lifetime of the batteries, with BEVs being flexible storage consumers that seems well within reach in a couple of years? We’re seeing the reshaping of the entire global energy system. Either we jump on the train or get run over.

More like a few decades, if ever. Battery production is estimated to reach 6.8 TWh per year in 2035 [1]. But only 12% of this is expected to go to battery storage systems, yielding just 800 GWh. 12 hours of storage worldwide at current electricity demand is 30,000 GWh. And by 2035, electricity demand is going to be more than that, as transportation and industry is increasingly electrified and migrated off of fossil fuels.

To reiterate, this is just for 12 hours of storage. Seasonal fluctuations can depress renewable generation for days or even weeks.

1. https://www.mckinsey.com/features/mckinsey-center-for-future...

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#713

Post by Manuel_D »

rootusrootus wrote: post #711
Manuel_D wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is substantially different than, say, attempting to build a dam in a flat place with no rivers. "It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here" Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar pa…

> There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.

No, you cannot just build a larger array.

That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#714

Post by jacquesm »

lucb1e wrote: post #650
jacquesm wrote: post #506

This is bad news because those are some of the most risky plants operating in Western Europe. Many, many safety issues over the years, quite a few of which were waved off from being properly fixed because they were going to be decommissioned anyway. Now whoever owns them will have to do all that back maintenance first. Or not... Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.

Better a potential bad outcome than directly measurable and ongoing harm, though Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-... with the different energy mixes at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/ . I know which european country's energy mix I'd choose if I could just pick one at will (with the caveat that running flat countries on hydro is not going to work, so that's sadly not ubiquitous…

Almost everybody that trumpets how fantastic France is doing with their nuclear fleet has no clue how they are really doing. You can start here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Oh, and good chance that in the summer months (when demand is pretty high, especially in the South of France) they may have to shut down again because of a lack of cooling capacity. France was ahead of the game in the 70's, but should have invested a lot more than they did since then. That they installed more than they needed also didn't help, especially not because the energy produced is sold on the open market at a net loss just to keep the reactors operating.

And last but not least: they have an ever growing waste problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste_management_in_Fr...

The cost of which (besides the maintenance costs mentioned above) has not been accounted for in the electricity pricing. If they did, they'd be running at an even higher loss. Probably the next generation will be presented the bill for that.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#715

Post by UltraSane »

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #699
UltraSane wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.

Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark

It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE

It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW

80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.

It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases"

They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.

It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.

The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.

Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.

This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#716

Post by rootusrootus »

Manuel_D wrote: post #713
rootusrootus wrote: post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.

No, you cannot just build a larger array. That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.

I do not think anyone is suggesting a pure solar solution.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#717

Post by epistasis »

simplyluke wrote: post #672
dalyons wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.

We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.

When we can't even get offshore wind to be built because the current Trump administration is setting the precedent of paying hundreds of million dollars to cancel good, money saving projects, while funneling reactor approval to corrupt companies that don't have the engineering chops to deliver on their promises, an "all of the above strategy" doesn't really work.

Sticking with well proven technologies, such as batteries and solar which are deployed at massive scale by profit oriented investors on the Texas grid, makes far more sense than wasting precious few dollars and approvals on pie-in-the-sky nuclear projects that never meet their promises and might not even finish construction.

Building nuclear is hard, risky, expensive, and slow, in the very best cases. It's a shitty technology unless you have zero renewable resources in your country.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#718

Post by beams_of_light »

foolfoolz wrote: post #339
bryanlarsen wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.

mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of hum…

What truly are humanity’s energy needs, though?

Do we need Facebook? Do we need Instagram? Do we need deepfakes and AI music?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#719

Post by Manuel_D »

rootusrootus wrote: post #716
Manuel_D wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot just build a larger array. That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.

I do not think anyone is suggesting a pure solar solution.

Your reply to me quite explicitly suggested that countries in far northern latitudes just build a proportionally larger array:

> That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#720

Post by trollbridge »

illiac786 wrote: post #579
simplyluke wrote: post #556

Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions. The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.

Yep, I have been saying for decades that I agree on almost everything wirh the local Green Party, _except_ the anti-nuclear stuff. Very emotional, very relatable but very dumb.

The anti-nuclear stuff seems to pair up quite well with "you need to start importing a lot of natural gas", which makes me think it is simply an agenda pushed by a certain rather large country to the east.
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