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EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

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Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#961

Post by pfdietz »

UltraSane wrote: post #949
zekrioca wrote: post #849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard of batteries?

Nuclear at $6,000-12,000/kW installed capacity becomes cheaper than solar+battery somewhere between 1-3 days of required backup.

Which is why you don't use batteries (at least, Li-ion batteries) much beyond diurnal storage. Systems analysis for renewables that assumes batteries are the only storage mode requires massive overbuilding of solar/wind, and this strawman engineering makes the nuclear alternative appear more competitive than it actually would be.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#962

Post by davidjytang »

m101 wrote: post #561

I think a good exercise for the reader is to reflect on why they were ever against nuclear power in the first place. Nuclear power was always the greenest, most climate friendly, safest, cheapest (save for what we do to ourselves), most energy dense, most long lasting, option.

I take it you mean well built and well run nuclear plant you.

Also is it most prone to human error?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#963

Post by mpweiher »

pfdietz wrote: post #960
burnt-resistor wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was involved in the nuclear industry in the 90's. Why impose externalities on others when solar and wind are so cheap and less risky? It seems like proponents fall for technological aspirationalism without considering pragmatic consequences and risks of shoveling enormous sums of money for unnecessary risks and inefficient allocations of capital because it's seems just barely unobtainable or blocked by "them" when…

And it's selective technological aspirationalism. Why is unbounded optimism appropriate for nuclear but not for renewables? The engineering principle of KISS says renewables should be much more improvable, as indeed the data indicates they are.

It's the other way around.

Nuclear works now. We just have to build it.

Intermittent renewables supplying an industrial society does not. And there is no way to get from here to there except a lot of handwaving and "magic happens here".

https://image.slidesharecdn.com/20100608webcontentchicagosli...

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#964

Post by ta1243 »

kbelder wrote: post #316
ta1243 wrote: post #63

Nuclear was a great option 20 years ago. Today though it's too late. The cost and time to generation (especially in the west) is too high, you'll get far better returns far more quickly from renewables and storage

We need to do what we can right now to avoid people saying this exact same thing 20 years from now.

That renewable and storage is more bang for buck?

20 years ago renewable+storage was orders of magntiude more than nuclear. Today it's not.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#965

Post by tremon »

wkat4242 wrote: post #932
gilbetron wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet if you look at the "Fatalities" column, you see a stream of zeroes with a handful of non-zeroes, the worst being Chernobyl at 50 direct fatalities. Rooftop solar accounts for more deaths. Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.

It's not just about deaths. That's the thing. People can get sick, the environment gets polluted. A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back. The area will remain closed for generations. Counting deaths does not do the actual damage justice.

A whole town got pulled out of their flats and was never allowed back

How does that measure against a whole planet being pulled out of thermal equilibrium, and the projected displacement of 1 billion people?

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#966

Post by pfdietz »

zvrba wrote: post #554
jama211 wrote: post #84

I’m totally fine with nuclear honestly, but I feel like I don’t understand something. No one seems to be able to give me a straight answer with proper facts that explain why we couldn’t just make a whole load more renewable energy generators instead. Sure, it might cost more, but in theory any amount of power a nuclear plant would generate could also be achieved with large amounts of renewables no?

Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed. This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is. EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpea…

Energy density is unimportant. What matters is cost. A source that has higher energy density but also higher cost is a loser.

The whole energy density meme was propagated by Vaclav Smil. He observed in the past that energy sources had become more energy dense, and then took the irrational leap to proclaim this was some sort of iron law of energy development.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#967

Post by yellowapple »

Eji1700 wrote: post #82
awalsh128 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever people think about Greenpeace I think it's a stretch to say they are a plant. They just lost a lawsuit recently and have to pay $660 mil for defamation against an oil company. It was a pretty ugly case.

There's this weird dissonance where people don't seem to want to admit that someone championing the same cause as them can be really really dumb about it. Must be a plant, couldn't possibly be that a lot of people take stances on positions due to their emotional reaction and don't always look at the evidence first. That's just them , not *US*.

I'd agree with that in the context of an individual or a small local group or something.

For a well-established organization like Greenpeace, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe it's a matter of them collectively having an emotional reaction. They have the resources to look at the evidence, and have indeed almost surely done so; when it comes to explaining their refusal to accept that evidence, ”their jobs depend on rejecting it” is a much simpler explanation IMO than “they are experiencing a collectively-identical ideological quirk that their organizational bureaucracy somehow has yet to iron out”.

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#968

Post by pfdietz »

opo wrote: post #913
tcfhgj wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany sits on storage capacity more than 247 TWh

What is the 247 TWh number referring too? Germany uses a little over 500 TWh of electricity per year. Germany has a little more than 20 GWh of grid storage.

It's referring to the possible storage capacity, probably the potential to store hydrogen in underground solution mined salt caverns.

I've heard much higher figures, in the PWh for Europe as a whole.

Storage of energy as heat at 600 C has much larger potential storage capacity; see standardthermal.com

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#969

Post by pfdietz »

epistasis wrote: post #787
JackSlateur wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some of those data seems sane: the cost of solar panels reduces due to tech improvements: ok The cost of coal increases a bit, maybe due to geopolicital issues: ok, seems legit The cost of nuclear increases .. why ? Why the step between 2016 and 2017 ? Does tech "de-improved" ? More insights would be interesting

There are several factors, but the single biggest reason for nuclear's ever increasing cost is due to construction productivity. All other forms of productivity have gone up drastically. However construction productivity remains stuck at a constant. And as other areas are more productive, we need to still pay those in construction competitive wages or else they would switch to more productive jobs with higher wages.…

Baumol's Cost Disease

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

Re: EU court rules nuclear energy is clean energy

#970

Post by yellowapple »

tomhow wrote: post #485
yellowapple wrote: post #14

[flagged]

You can't comment like this on HN, no matter how right you are or think you are. This comment breaks several guidelines, most notably these ones: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1…

Sorry. I'll tone it down going forward.
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