Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infreque…
Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
761–770 of 1001 posts
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#762Believing 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.
What about the opposition from the not exactly environmentalist orgs? > "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the p…
Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#763I didn't know there were so many nuclear engineers on HN.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#764Everytime this comes up, HN is becoming more and more an X-like echo chamber: Touting nukes as the solution to a spike-load problem in a densely populated area, and the waste disposal as a solved problem (by externalizing the cost). Meanwhile the prices dropped further than ever, 20kW peak with 20kWh batteries for EUR 10k, which provides >95% self-sufficiency in a 2p Household and lets you sell more than 80% of the y…
And what are those?
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
If sunlight is blocked the amount of people who die due to starvation from crop failures will probably more than make up for the difference in lost solar power energy. That is to say, we'll have much larger issues than a stable power grid to contend with.
If we directed worldwide LED production all into artificial light for farming, and grew whatever was most calorie-efficient, I think we could theoretically feed every human alive if the sun was blocked out tomorrow. Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#767Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Stan…
Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.
Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.
In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.
Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.
And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#768Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record. It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record. My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
Would it be fair to say that because the US Navy is not running it as a for-profit power generation that would help. Like every accident seems to be a list of cost saving shortcuts being responsible
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you know, just build renewables and storage. Displace vastly more coal faster with a death per kWh where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work. No need for any special casing.
> where the only injuries comes from traditional construction and mechanical industry work. Still count.
For the general public no harm can come their way.
Unless they through some mechanical failure manage to walk underneath a wind turbine shedding or collapsing.
Same with solar. Which is even less risky.
For nuclear power the about all effects from a large scale failure will impact society through either radiation or life changing evacuations.
And then society is on the hook to pay for the entire cleanup work.
For renewables the only people who get harmed are those who work in the industry. The risk for the general public is zero.