Critical hearing looms in battle over California’s last nuclear power plant • Hacker News Board

Re: Critical hearing looms in battle over California’s last nuclear power plant

#81

Post by adventured » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 5:46 PM UTC

taylodl wrote: post #34

adventured wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't square, it's extraordinarily irrational. With a trillion dollars the US could build 40-60 new domestic nuclear power plants (we have 54 currently). We can afford it (witness stimulus programs, or the Ukraine v Russia war). What we can't afford is to not do it and to watch our nuclear power base vanish. And we should be going further than that. We should be leveraging the global reserve currency and trade a…

So you're volunteering to put the nuclear power station in your backyard? Because that's the problem - lots of people say they support nuclear power until you try to build a nuclear power station anywhere close to them. Which brings up another problem, you need to build a nuclear power station near a water source such as a lake, or a river, which, interestingly enough, are the same kinds of places where people want t…

> So you're volunteering to put the nuclear power station in your backyard?

Sure. I have no problem with nuclear. Where can I sign?

Re: Critical hearing looms in battle over California’s last nuclear power plant

#82

Post by Gibbon1 » Tue, Aug 22, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #79

Gibbon1 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moss Landing can deliver 750MW with 3.0 GWh of total capacity. State has a total of 5GW. 90% of it rolled out in the last 3 years. The problem with building a nuke plant starting today is it'll be a stranded asset before it goes online in 10-15 years.

So 5GWh of storage capacity would be about 0.6% of average daily usage. We're going to need a lot more than that to make renewables viable for base load. How much will that cost, how long will it take to build, and where will we mine the raw materials?

Well ten years ago you would have said the idea that solar and wind would be 25% of the states power generation in ten years was total nonsense.

But here we are.

Three years ago, well yesterday, you would have said the idea that the state would have 5 GW of utility batteries was nonsense.

But here we are.

Re: Critical hearing looms in battle over California’s last nuclear power plant

#83

Post by theptip » Wed, Aug 23, 2023, 7:51 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #72

cesarb wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand why people keep claiming that solar and wind are "cheap". It's simple: they're looking at the incremental cost of adding one more solar panel string or one more wind turbine, compared to generating that same amount of power with the already existing power plant mix. > The cost goes way up once you include enough storage and long-range transmission to maintain grid stability. That cost exists only…

I don't think you've actually done the math on that one. Keeping gas power plants online but unused except when renewables are unavailable is extremely expensive. We've been able to kind of ignore that up until now because of the limited scale of renewables generation but eventually the economics become untenable. Who is going to pay the large fixed costs to keep those gas plants on standby?

> I don't think you've actually done the math on that one.

Since you are implying that you _have_ done the math on this one, would you care to share links to analysis/modeling that backs up your position? I'm always open to being persuaded.

Recently I have been citing https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar/ for the claim "solar is cheap on the margin", and modeling like https://theconversation.com/up-to-90-of-electricity-from-sol..., https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... for "storage isn't going to be too expensive for some time".

To be clear I'm not making any particular case for how we cover the last 10% or so of demand, though I'd note that gas peakers are already a thing that are required to solve this problem, and yes they are expensive, but not unfeasibly so. My claim was it's cheap on the margin, right now. In a decade when we're closer to 100% it might start to get more expensive to replace the marginal % of generation with solar/wind.

Nuclear doesn't help at all with the intra-day variable portion of the demand curve, it's just lower-variance so you don't need to worry about inter-day fluctuations. It seems that most of the time, a diverse blend of renewables averages out the inter-day variability so it's not clear to me exactly how much we need in storage to guard against "no wind / no sun" days. (Is this the mirror problem that we currently have, where a heat wave in TX means the mostly-not-renewable grid can't keep up? Sometimes we see outlier weather-related demand-supply mismatches, and spot pricing / demand shedding are typically how we respond to those outliers.) Over-provisioning wind and solar might still be cheaper than building nuclear and/or storage, or perhaps green hydrogen might be a better option. Or perhaps we keep some gas peakers around.

For the intra-day variability we're already seeing lots of mixed-solar/battery being built (see the LBL report I linked above) which tends to be in the ballpark of load-shifting the generation 4 hours, which is most of what we need for intra-day gap between demand and solar peak production. This is still affordable vs running coal plants, and only going to get cheaper over time.

Anyway, this isn't my field and I'm open to being persuaded, if you want to share some modeling that you think is better.