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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

dpa-international.com

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#921

Earlier 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...

Your post is completely orthogonal to the point I made and also fails to account for the fact that distributed renewables have enormous capex cost in the form of transmission and storage that we just disregard. Building a nuke plant on a major transmission route doesn't require any of that.

You're arguing against a point nobody made

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#922

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.

It is quadruply impressive that the Navy has solved “waterproof and saltproof at a few dozen atmospheres, mobile global nuclear”.

In the meantime, mobile phones are still figuring out how to operate reliably globally, . But phone plans are hard.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#923
post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to run coal power plant close to 100% to be profitable. You want to run nuclear power plant close to 100% because fuel is cheap and you want pay back CAPEX as early as possible. The article you send is perfect example why it's not economic to build new coal or nuclear power plants in US. The reasons are: very cheap natural gas and no CO2 tax. In US natural gas + solar is the cheapest way to generate el…

Renewable + battery is already the cheapest and fastest way to build new power in many domains + geographies, and the number of and range keeps expanding as the price keeps dropping. It's always a peculiar response that outright ignores certain power combos, and it always seems to come in nuclear discussions.

You mean solar + batteries. Batteries can be used to flatten the day/night cycle of a solar power plant on many days. But it's depending on location and it's not cheap.

For cost of $100 / MWh, you can do it in sunny regions like Spain, Mexico, middle East.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-solar-panels-and-...

It doesn't make economic sense to combine batteries with wind, because periods of low wind output can be multiple weeks long. The betterie costs would be ridiculous.

How do you cover the last 10-20% of the missing solar+wind+batteries output, at what cost?

Usually its a combo of solar+wind+batteries+fosil , costs depend gas cost and CO2 costs.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you pretending batteries don't exist? And long distance interconnects? And not even talking about hydro, geothermal, wave, and who knows what else.

grid scale batteries longer than 4 hours don't exist. You can't design a reliable electrical grid based on vibes. You have to design it on what cost effective technologies actually exist where you need them.

Id say this is plainly wrong.

Additionally, there are more storage technologies than batteries in the classical sense.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#926
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions. With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance). But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance r…

The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.

You can look at the projections by all the grid providers if you don't believe me.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shorthand for a Joule (unit of energy) per second (unit of time). Watt is the problem with that?

The real problem is the widespread usage of Wh as a unit of energy It would make way more sense to use J and J/h instead

I gotta start describing distances as mph-hours

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the marketing brocure said "too cheap too meter" but the result is often a White Elephant. Please explain how the nuclear folks missed the "too cheap to meter" target on account of some external shills. That is: how does one ensure that the next round of nuclear will not White Elepant like many of the previous rounds did? Besides the taxpayers taking it on the chin, as they usually do.

The shills do fear mongering to scare people into passing regulations that increase costs independent of the cost/benefit ratio, require costs to be internalized that other generation methods aren't required to (it should either be everyone or no one), and file lawsuits against construction projects to induce delays and increase costs again.

If a few moonbeam hippies (as claimed with so much evidence) can send love rays and scuttle the nuclear industry, or a few of Orwell's pigs can do much the same, then the nuclear industry is quite weak and that will need to be priced in by the market. "And it would have worked if not for you meddling kids!", or the Scooby-Doo argument as to why nuclear has had too many White Elephants. I mean if some Russian plutocrats whilst the Soviets were doing the Gorbachev can cause nuclear White Elephants worldwide, wow! That's really bad! Those not completely given over to the paranoid style in politics (where some outgroup is the bane of whatever) may wish to consider how much of the nuclear industry failures are own goals caused by hubris, incompetence, delusional thinking, or the corrupting influence of Mammon, things often not present in places more capable of running a tight ship.

Nuclear one may recall was "the obvious next thing" so was where anyone who was somebody (or had delusions thereof) went, just as hypersonic planes were "the obvious next thing" so everyone at Boeing who was somebody (or had delusions thereof) were on the A-team for hypersonics. And where else do Angel investors rush in where fools fear to tread?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#929

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.

Nuclear is too expensive and takes to long. We can't afford to waste the resources that could go into a fully green grid in a couple of years taking decades building a fraction of that capacity as nuclear.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per TWh, nuclear kills fewer people than solar , mostly because roofing is dangerous. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it. A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh. Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't upda…

yep. On the other hand, interestingly, most nuclear deaths are from Fukushima evacuation which wasnt necessary, due to too small dose
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