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> India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels. One has to admire the no-nonsense problem
by elsonrodriguez 8y ago
> India plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels.
One has to admire the no-nonsense problem solving happening here.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up. Until then, it’s PR, not energy policy. Aspiration alone is no different than failure.
- mav3rick 8y agoAspiration is also the first step to success.
- idDriven 8y agoAlso pretty much anything is better than coal and fossil fuels. I can't hear the phrase 'clean coal' bandied about without wanting to bang my head against the nearest wall.
- Alupis 8y ago> I’ll admire it when the fuel is loaded and the generators spin up Meanwhile, the United States continues to shut down Nuclear Reactors and prevent modern constructions out of irrational fearmongering. At least India recognizes the benefits of Nuclear Power...
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI’ll bet you lunch the US replaces every GW of nuclear generation with solar, wind, and utility scale energy storage in 10 years (sooner than any nuclear generator would come online). Disclaimer: I am an armchair energy policy enthusiast, and aggregate generator permitting, construction, turn up, operation, and decommissioning data for visualization and production siting. Edit: Lunch bet email in my profile.
- sremani 8y agoI will take that bet.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Alupis 8y agoSure, maybe that happens. Only an irrational culture would squander an obviously great energy source. But you cannot dispute the massive resources, and square footage it requires to accomplish that future of massive wind farms, every building with solar panels installed, and huge battery warehouses littered throughout the nation... especially when compared to a handful of modern Nuclear Reactor Plants. More people die installing Solar Roof Panels than from all the Nuclear energy production combined [1][2][3] [1] https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all-energy-sources.html https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... [2] https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull21-1/21104091117.pdf https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi... [3] https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forgotten-dangers-of-solar-panels/ https://asiancorrespondent.com/2011/05/green-deaths-the-forg...
- toomuchtodo 8y agoI don’t dispute the land constraints, it’s the economics you can’t argue with. Solar and wind at utility scale are below 2 cents/kWh and falling. Nuclear cannot compete with that in any configuration. You can make roof installs safer (process, hardware), utility installs on the ground are already safe. No one has any place to store nuclear waste, no one will insure it, and no one wants to tie capital up for decades in nuclear generators. Nuclear, like coal, is a wonderful fuel if you can foist all of the externalities on someone else.
- Alupis 8y agoThe Solar and Wind kWh production doesn't take into account having to store it, which costs additional money. Nuclear didn't become expensive all on it's own... it became expensive after 60+ years of not building new Nuclear plants in the United States and keeping only a few outdated first-generation plants... Modern Nuclear plants are very safe, and very cost effective... and can ramp up or down energy production on demand. Plus, they can be built wherever people want... not just where sunlight or wind patterns are suitable. Solar Roof Panel installation is dangerous because people fall off the roof...yet, that alone has led to more deaths than Nuclear energy production. The U.S. Navy has gone 60 years without a nuclear accident (the entire history since inception of the "Nuclear Navy")... and that's in vehicles (both surface and submarine vessels) designed to be shot, blown up, and sunk in combat. Nuclear is safe, and cost effective. Particularly when considering modern approaches to reactors and spent fuel recycling and storage practices. We, as a nation, are just irrationally afraid of something most people simply don't understand.
- Brakenshire 8y agoThere is plenty of fearmongering, but the thing preventing new nuclear construction is more economics than anything else.
- sampo 8y agoNuclear didn't just become expensive. The fearmongering made it expensive.
- mc32 8y agoSadly 3MI and Chernobyl turned environmentalists against it. In fairness, one can’t blame them, but as a technology matured and is better understood and built, they should actively support something they previously were against arguably for valid safety concerns.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoFukushima was the nail in the coffin. A lot of people don't remember Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl had been spun (not unreasonably) as Soviet incompetence. People in general were cautiously tolerant of nuclear until Fukushima. It's a damn shame.
- mc32 8y agoYes but the tech was dead before Fukushima the first. Da ichi was a 40-50 year old tech, and for the tech it did okay given the circumstances. So even before Fukushima, there’d be delay after delay for more studies and impact and safety concerns for new projects and old ones getting shut down mostly due to thd ghosts of 3MI and Chernobyl. Of course it doesn’t help to engender confidence in the tech as this legacy is the baggage any new tech faces in any consideration.
- aurailious 8y agoWhats kind of funny is that Chernobyl is the newest reactor of the 3 that have failed. Both Three Mile Island and Fukushima are older reactors.
- dv_dt 8y agoIt's a trope that Nuclear is failing because of fearmongering. Nuclear is uneconomical, especially with renewable energy dropping in cost consistently. Is France, the long time operator of one of the largest fleets, afraid of nuclear - I think it is very experienced at managing nuclear, both old gen and the very newest gen reactors. And yet this article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-power-costs-will-rise-if-renewables-are-sidestepped https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-10/french-po... France will save 39 billion euros ($44.5 billion) if it refrains from building 15 new nuclear plants by 2060, and bets instead on renewable energy sources to replace its all its aging atomic facilities, a government agency said. France should spend 1.28 trillion euros over the next four decades, mostly on clean power production and storage capacities, networks, and imports, according to a report from the country’s environment ministry. If it does this, France would progressively shut down its 58 atomic plants and renewable energy would comprise 95 percent of its electricity output by 2060, up from 17 percent last year
- aloer 8y ago39 billion of 1.28 trillion is 3%. Does that mean they only save 3% when betting on falling prices for renewables? For four decades? Doesn't sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- philipkglass 8y agoDoesn't sound much like a financial advantage compared to the (presumably) more predictable and stable prices for nuclear. Reactors that are already built and in good operating order provide very predictable electricity at low-moderate costs. Building new reactors is much less predictable. France's latest reactor design, the EPR, is many years behind schedule and many billions over budget at both French and Finnish projects to build the new reactor. It was even years late when built in China, where presumably no lawsuits/activists/excessive safety regulations were ever allowed to get in the way.
- gdy 8y agoRussian-built reactors are already generating electricity.
- kortilla 8y ago>Aspiration alone is no different than failure. By that measure solar and wind are catastrophic failures given that they still depend on non-existent storage technologies to hit any kind of baseload replacement goals.
- philipkglass 8y agoIndia plans to triple its nuclear capacity by 2024 to wean Asia's third-largest economy off polluting fossil fuels. That's a really short timeline. India's newest reactor Kudankulam 2 took 14 years from construction start to first criticality: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.aspx?current=853 https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails.... The only American reactors currently under construction, Vogtle 3 and 4, were originally supposed to be built in less than 5 years but are now projected to take 8 years. But maybe the American reactors aren't intended to be part of the generation added by 2024. India does have 7 reactors currently under construction.
- roenxi 8y ago2024 is an eyewatering timeframe, but the actual construction might not be the hardest part. The Chinese have figured out how to do prefabbed skyscrapers in 19 days [0] and the prefabbing is probably highly parallel. If a nuclear plant is 100 times harder than a skyscraper to build that is still only about 5 years as a lower bound. If they've already done the scoping, fundraising, location picking and had a construction firm who optimised for speed & quality but not cost then I can see ~5 years as achievable, although they probably won't manage it. This is one of nuclear many advantages over more usual nonrenewable, things can happen orders of magnitude more quickly because the physical footprint is so small. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-construction-firm-erects-57-storey-skyscraper-in-19-days https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/30/chinese-constr...
- jabl 8y agoAFAIK one limitation is forging of the large pressure vessels, mainly the reactor itself and the steam generators. Those take a long time. Of course you can do multiple ones in parallel, but then the limit is that there's about 25 heavy forge presses on the planet, of which only a subset are doing nuclear work. So in total the capacity at the moment is maybe 50 large pressure vessels per year worldwide. If one plant requires one reactor and 4 steam generators that would then be 10 plants per year. Of course it's possible to increase the worldwide heavy forging capacity, but again, something that takes time. Then there are many reactor designs that don't use water as a coolant or moderator; those are obviously not restricted by heavy forge capacity. But those reactors are mostly on the drawing board and not available off the shelf.
- m0zg 8y agoAnyone who, at the same time, claims that "we're all gonna die" if something is not done in the next decade, and doesn't want to consider nuclear is a hypocrite, and not a very bright person. If you believe in the first premise (for the record, I do not, although I do believe in man-made climate change), then you have to concede that nuclear is the only way out that's anywhere near viable without pretending that we can spend tens of trillions of dollars on infrastructure that needs to be replaced every 20 years.